Columnist Ron Kantowski: LV Bowl destined for mediocrity

Thursday, May 11, 2000 | 10:15 a.m.

Ron Kantowski's column appears Thursday. Reach him at ron@lasvegassun.com or 259-4088.

There is a scene in the movie "Caddyshack" in which Carl the Greenskeeper (Bill Murray) is trying to explain his bright future to one of the skeptical bag boys.

The disheveled Carl relates how he once caddied for the Dali Lama, who, rather than leaving a tip, promised the greenskeeper the equivalent of everlasting happiness.

"So I've got that going for me," Carl says proudly.

Which is more than the Las Vegas Bowl can say.

During a golf outing in Arizona last week, LV Bowl officials were considering everlasting mediocrity -- an alliance with the Pac-10 Conference, which would have the Pac-10 sending its sixth-place team to meet the Mountain West Conference's second choice in our annual pigskin "classic" on Dec. 21. That's sixth -- as in closer to last place than first.

To take the Dali Lama analogy a step further, if the Rose Bowl is the granddaddy of the bowl games, than the Las Vegas Bowl is the Tibetan orphan. But in retrospect, perhaps that couldn't be avoided.

When the LV Bowl ended its relationship with the Big West and Mid-American conferences, there was a prevailing notion that the bowl would immediately gain in stature and make some attractive matchups. You be the judge: In the three years since, the LV Bowl has paired Oregon with Air Force, North Carolina with San Diego State and Utah with Fresno State.

By the time the Las Vegas Bowl gets around to picking and choosing, there's not much left to pick and choose from. All of the major conferences have made deals with more established and/or lucrative bowl games, and there are more bowls -- 25 sanctioned this year -- than ever before.

Given the Las Vegas Bowl's smallish $800,000 per team payout, there usually aren't a whole lot of 6-5 teams still not spoken for when the anticlimactic bowl bids are mailed out.

The negative connotation of featuring a sixth-place team aside, it's understandable the local bowl committee thinks the regional Pac-10 tie-in is a good thing. Organizers no doubt learned from that North Carolina experience that asking fans to travel cross-country a week before Christmas is wishful thinking.

With a Pac-10 deal, they might get lucky and provide the booby prize for a bona fide program such as UCLA or Southern Cal or Arizona State in a down year. Their presence might help move a few more tickets locally. But it has been documented that those teams travel about as well as a hyperactive Chihuahua when they're 6-5.

In the more likely scenario, you're looking at marginal entities such as Cal or Oregon or Oregon State. In that those teams usually have to buy a ticket to watch the Rose Bowl, it's logical to assume their fans might consider the Las Vegas Bowl a lovely parting gift. But when Oregon State made its first bowl appearance since 1812 at one of the Hawaii games last year, nobody from Corvallis bothered showing up.

With the number of lesser bowls at an all-time high but interest in them at an all-time low, it's only a matter of time before the NCAA brandishes its ax. In fact, the Las Vegas Bowl has been cautioned that a crowd of 22,542, which is what last year's Utah-Fresno game drew, won't be good enough to keep from getting bowled under when that day arrives.

But if a series of Utah vs. Washington State games is the alternative, maybe that's not such a bad thing.