Colleges Go Bowling For Nothing In The Big Picture Now, Only One Bowl Counts And It’s On Jan. 2

New Year’s Day used to be the exclamation point for college football, an all-day, all-night marathon of bowl games that provided an exciting windup to the season.

Now Jan. 1 is reduced to an afterthought; excess baggage. It is, as Shakespeare might have said, sound and fury signifying nothing.

Because America demands closure in its sports, the citizenry was never quite satisfied with a bowl system that did not guarantee an undisputed national champion.

And because college football aims to please, it created a can’t-miss No. 1 vs. No. 2 showdown, this year between Nebraska and Florida in the Fiesta Bowl on Jan. 2. That’s nice - for the Fiesta Bowl. But it doesn’t do much for the pastel blazer crowd operating the other bowls.

No problem. They’ll get their chance down the road. The Alliance rotates the championship game among the heavyweight Orange, Sugar and Fiesta bowls. If you happen to be another bowl, good luck attracting any attention. You are superfluous. Import big-name teams. Put on fancy parades and parties. It doesn’t matter. The main event is elsewhere.

And if you happen to be in the Big Ten or Pac-10 and still tied to the old fogy, but still fabulously wealthy, Rose Bowl, you are out of the Bowl Alliance and really out of luck.

That leaves Northwestern, the best story in the sport this year, cornered. The Wildcats are thrilled to be playing in the Rose Bowl as Big Ten champs and taking home the accompanying $8.2 million payout. But the best they can hope for is No. 2 in the final poll and they could wind up considerably lower should they happen to lose to Southern California. It seems that at this point, their elevator is equipped with a rather large down button and an awfully small up one.

Not that Northwestern is complaining. This season has been more than fruitful for the Cats, far exceeding anything they could have hoped for before it began.

Still, under the old system, SEC champ Florida would have been contracted for the Sugar Bowl and Big Eight champ Nebraska ticketed for the Orange Bowl. With Big Ten champ Northwestern in Pasadena, New Year’s Day would have been an intriguing coast-to-coast battle for the national championship, a three-way tug-of-war involving three bowls, not just one. The aftermath would have involved a lot of “ifs” and “buts” - the stuff upon which hot-stove banter is constructed.

“Without this Alliance, we’d be back in New Orleans and Nebraska would be back in Miami and it could all come down to voting,” said Florida coach Steve Spurrier, a longtime playoff proponent.

What would have been so bad about that?

This makes it simpler, we are told. This is better.

Different? Yes. Better? Not necessarily. It’s always best when reinvent ing the wheel to make sure it is round.

What the Bowl Alliance created was what it believed everybody wanted, a guaranteed national champion with no room for argument. Florida and Nebraska cooperated by arriving undefeated, conveniently ranked 1-2. What the Alliance overlooked is the drama that leads up to the ultimate game - the playoff.

The NFL season heated up this weekend with the wild card double-headers on Saturday and today. Next weekend we have divisional playoffs, then conference championships, all a prelude to the Super Bowl.

Baseball discovered playoffs in 1969, hockey and basketball long before that. College football, though, has studiously avoided that solution.

The sport should have learned from its academic partners in college basketball. What makes March Madness so exciting for the roundball fraternity is the 64-team NCAA Tournament. The Final Four is the playoff payoff. It wouldn’t be nearly as much fun if, after the regular season, the gurus of college basketball simply sent the two top teams into a one-game championship showdown.

The bowls would have been a perfect Final Four for college football, an appetizer for the main event. Instead, the Alliance wound up eliminating the suspense and, by the way, Northwestern, too.