Bowl Season Still Seems Relatively Meaningless

By Mike DeCourcy
The college football bowl season begins Thursday with a gotta-be-there matchup between Navy and Utah in the San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl. No kidding.
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This affair commences such a profoundly important part of the annual sports calendar that some of the coaches might even show up.
Well, not Houston Nutt, Karl Dorrell or Dennis Franchione. They were shown to the door, gently or forcefully, and nobody in power at Arkansas, UCLA or Texas A&M thought their team’s pending bowl appearances to be important enough to wait until those games were contested before the coaching transactions were complete.
Not Art Briles or, apparently, Rich Rodriguez, who decided there were better jobs available than Houston and West Virginia and determined the small matter of a bowl game wasn’t worth a delay in sending out the change-of-address cards.
When’s the last time we saw a basketball coach who was heading to the NCAA Tournament change jobs before his team was eliminated? Near as I can tell, it was Bill Frieder, who took the Arizona State job on the eve of Michigan’s appearance in the 1989 championship. Maybe it’s the fear of being “Fishered” that has led subsequent coaches to wait for elimination before executing job changes, or maybe it’s just that NCAA Tournament games matter more than bowl games.
The basketball guys actually are playing for a championship, and real competitors don’t walk away from that. Who wins and loses in a football bowl game seems not to matter -- even to the participants.
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Mike DeCourcy is a Sporting News senior writer. He’s covered NCAA basketball for about 25 years, and for SN since 1995. The man knows everything about hoops. Seriously, it’s freaky. ↵