Columnist Dean Juipe: Rough stretch for Utah sports fans

Dean Juipe

Friday, Dec. 14, 2001 | 9:53 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or 259-4084.

The temptation was to corner Ron McBride and badger him, relentlessly if need be.

The Utah football coach was in town Thursday to take part in a luncheon promoting the Las Vegas Bowl, a Christmas Day extravaganza that features his team vs. Southern California at Sam Boyd Stadium.

As a veteran coach with his share of ups and downs, McBride realizes he has off-the-field responsibilities that include explaining the occasional untimely failure. But could he or would he respond to a series of inquiries pertaining to our northeasterly neighbors as a whole, those crazy Utes?

It has been a bad week or two for sports fans, politicians and business leaders in Utah. If it wasn't McBride's team losing to Air Force after accepting a bid in the Las Vegas Bowl, it was Brigham Young seeing its undefeated football season end in a wild loss at Hawaii, followed by Sports Illustrated pillorying the state for its gimme, gimme, gimme approach to confiscating federal monies to not only fund the 2002 Winter Olympics, but to rebuild the state's infrastructure and add to a few already wealthy individuals' personal holdings at the public's expense.

McBride is only accountable for his team, of course, but its 38-37 loss to Air Force -- which was its second straight defeat -- contributed a substantially negative jolt to a Las Vegas Bowl that didn't need a forearm shiver at a time when it was already finding Utah vs. USC something of a difficult sell. No one expected Air Force to beat Utah and no amount of rationalizing -- "a letdown" barely describes it -- can offset the damage that was done from the perspective of the bowl organizers.

It's now said that neither Utah nor USC is apt to re-sell the 12,500 tickets each was obliged to purchase as part of accepting the bowl berth. Likewise, selling another 11,000 tickets to locals got that much tougher after McBride's team fell flat in a game it should have won by at least a couple of touchdowns.

But that loss, damaging as it was seen in Las Vegas, was merely the first of three blows to Utah's proud populace.

That their vaunted BYU team dropped a 72-45 game in Hawaii was doubly difficult to swallow, given the Cougars' 12-0 record going into the game and their focal point in the argument advocating a playoff system to determine the national champion. BYU took itself out of any real or hypothetical national title mix with a defeat that also led to this conclusion: Hawaii would have been a better Las Vegas Bowl participant than either 7-4 Utah or 6-5 Southern Cal.

And then there's SI lowering the boom on Utah for an Olympics that appear to be so costly and paved with gold that greed has manifested itself as a medal sport.

The feds have committed $342 million to Utah, plus another $40 million for security measures, raising the total cost of the Games to a record $1.9 billion. As detailed in a lengthy article, many of these expenses are frivolous and many have enriched a number of land owners and developers who parlayed their political connections and a certain federal apathy into a financial bonanza of near-record proportions.

But McBride didn't deserve to be castigated on this, so I shied away from asking. Besides, he's sufficiently skewered as it is.