ESPN Network: ESPN.com | NFL.com | NBA.com | NHL.com | ESPNdeportes | ABCSports | EXPN | FANTASY |
Bowl season has bowled us over By Ray Ratto Special to ESPN.com The end of the bowl season is always cause for joy, because, and let's be brutally frank here now that the new year is upon us, there are about 23 too many bowl games for our interest level. That leaves three to care about, and frankly, we run hot and cold on two of them.
You see, steady snow is the one elemental force that progress hasn't yet beaten. Artificial turf is weatherproofed concrete, and grass fields have now been made to drain so well that you don't get those classic mudders NFL Films like to drop in between Jim Brown retrospectives. But nobody can plow snow forever, and eventually the plowers in Shreveport threw up their hands and told the two teams, "We're not getting pneumonia on New Year's Eve just for your good time, so you fellas are just going to have to be on your own. The result was a triumph, making the largely irrelevant into riveting entertainment -- surely superior in every way to the networks' dueling shows of young people dancing before hack bands who are years past their time and waiting for the ball to drop extravaganzas. Put another way, more people will remember the Independence Bowl than the Baha Men's last nanosecond of visibility. Put yet another way, more people will remember the Independence Bowl than the MobileAlabamaLasVegasOahuAlohaMotorCityGalleryfurniture.comHumanitarian MusicCityMicronPC.comInsight.comLibertySunPeachHolidayAlamoSiliconValley Bowl, in which the score was always 33-20 and nobody paid a lick of attention. Most importantly, the Independence Bowl will make us tune in every bowl game next year, at least long enough to see if the weather stinks. We are like horses in that we can be led to anything (the XFL will be the latest proof of that), but we are not necessarily inclined to bite. And since the BCS has already succeeded at half its mandate -- to render all but one bowl game utterly meaningless -- the 2000 Independence may have given the second-through-fifth tier bowl game a new life. Give us dreadful weather, give us misery with a scoreboard, give us cornerbacks being blown down the field like tumbleweeds ... we eat it up with a gravy boat. So we'll give the bowl season one more chance, next year. But we want typhoons. We want locusts and rivers of blood, we want icebergs in the end zones and flesh-eating falcons. And either we get it, or the Outback has seen the last of us. Ray Ratto of the San Francisco Chronicle is a regular contributor to ESPN.com |
Miss. St. ekes out win in wintry, wild Independence Confident Stoops, confident team |
ESPN.com: HELP | ADVERTISER INFO | CONTACT US | TOOLS | SITE MAP Copyright ©2000 ESPN Internet Ventures. Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and Safety Information are applicable to this site. Click here for a list of employment opportunities at ESPN.com. |