Columnist Dean Juipe: Too many bowls, too few worthy

Dean Juipe

Wednesday, Dec. 11, 2002 | 9:48 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4084.

Like many a graveyard, this one looks full from a distance without quite being at its absolute capacity.

But, in time, it'll be bursting at its coffin-pickin' seams.

College football has too many postseason bowl games and not all of them deserve to survive. That has been the case for a number of years, but it appears especially evident this year with a record 28 games scheduled -- including a few of extremely dubious merit.

Teams without winning records and teams that have already fired their coaches dot the bowl schedule, as conceptually difficult as that is to comprehend. After all, isn't a bowl invitation supposed to be a reward for an outstanding season?

Well, that's not necessarily the case anymore.

These days, the bowl landscape is saturated with mediocrity. Teams that can't even finish in the first division of their leagues are making bowl appearances, with the Big Ten the greatest offender.

How can any bowl be comfortable taking a team such as Minnesota or Wisconsin, given that the Gophers finished 3-5 in their conference and the Badgers were an even worse 2-6? Yet Minnesota is in the Music City Bowl (vs. Arkansas) and Wisconsin is in the Alamo Bowl (vs. Colorado), whether anyone outside of their state boundaries gives a hoot or not.

There are several other games with an equally drab persona: Wake Forest (6-6) vs. Oregon (7-5) in the Seattle Bowl; Purdue (6-6) vs. Washington (7-5) in the Sun Bowl; and North Texas (7-5) vs. Cincinnati (7-6) in the New Orleans Bowl qualify, in advance, as certain duds.

Heck, Oregon is in a bowl in spite of having lost three straight games and five of its last six, which leads to this observation: If Hans Blix and his U.N. weapons inspectors had the initiative and the wherewithal to form a football team, they, too, might get in on this bowl sprawl.

The proliferation of bowls not only butts heads with common economic sense, it spreads despite the lessons of history. The bowl graveyard includes some doozies, the one and only Bacardi Bowl (in Havana, in 1937) a sentimental favorite for all.

Among the many others that have fallen by the wayside were the Aviation, the Camellia, the Gotham, the Mercy, the Oil and at least 22 others, including no less than three -- the Bluebonnet, the California and the Freedom -- that had some marginal clout in their heydays.

Of course no surly analysis of the upcoming bowl season would be complete without a reference to our own Las Vegas Bowl, although I promised its director last week that I would lay off the venom for a while. But that was before UCLA -- which was invited on Sunday to participate in the Dec. 25 game with New Mexico -- fired its head coach on Monday.

If anyone ever needed justification to claim there are too many bowl games, the fact that bowl-bound UCLA canned its coach a day after accepting a bowl bid only proves the argument. There's no elation for the Bruins: They're so distraught at the thought of playing in Las Vegas on Christmas that they had to get rid of the guy who led them here.

Bowls come and bowls go, and expulsion and/or extinction is part of the process. Toward that inevitability, some that are still breathing today may as well get started on carving a headstone.