web page Bob Hunter commentary: There was a time when Rose Bowl mattered
Friday, November 16, 2007 4:05 AM
By Bob Hunter
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
Dionte Johnson says the Rose Bowl was just about all his father ever talked about. Pepper Johnson played linebacker at Ohio State from 1982 to '85, back when the football resembled a pregnant watermelon, cows gave their lives to become football helmets and everybody ran the single-wing offense -- or so it must seem to today's players.
Pepper Johnson is what they would call a real old-timer. Dionte Johnson, a senior fullback for the Buckeyes, must consider himself lucky to have grown up around a football relic such as that.
"That's one of the craziest things growing up," Dionte Johnson said. "My father always preached to me going to the Rose Bowl, going to the Rose Bowl, to where I thought the Rose Bowl was like the Super Bowl of college football."
Silly boy. Everybody knows that the Rose Bowl is one of the places you might go if you don't make the national championship game, except in years when it plays host to the national championship game. It's kind of like the Capital One Bowl with mountains or the Liberty Bowl with a parade.
Linebacker James Laurinaitis said his grandfather has suggested that he should aim to play in the Rose Bowl at least once while at Ohio State.
"Being able to go there and realizing we haven't been there in a long time is something," Laurinaitis said. "To be a part of that kind of historic tradition would be pretty neat."
Kind of like a visit to colonial Williamsburg, right? Well, not exactly, but the more the Ohio State players talked in preparation for a Michigan game that probably is for a trip to the Rose Bowl, the more it sounded that way.
The Rose Bowl sits between Linda Vista Avenue and I-210 in Pasadena, Calif., smack in the center of a wide generation gap. For 50 years, it was the be-all, end-all of Big Ten football dreams and the envy of conferences that had other tie-ins. Then in 1998, it mostly became a place where Big Ten and Pacific-10 champions go when they don't make it to the title game.
Nothing better illustrates the downside of the current Bowl Championship Series setup than this. There was a huge outcry for a game to "decide" the national champion, and now that we have it, it has sucked the life out of every other bowl game. So it is that a 10-1 Ohio State team that has had a heck of season will probably have to settle for beating Michigan and playing the Rose Bowl.
If you're older than 30, you might remember how it was when the Rose Bowl was the goal, when it was OK to lose a game during the season as long as you still had a chance to get to Pasadena. There were five big games on New Year's Day then, games that all had some effect on the final rankings. But people wanted a real title game, one matching No. 1 vs. No. 2, and this quasi-BCS title game was born.
Don't get me wrong: It would be nice if college football had a real playoff to decide the national title. But the argument that the current system preserves the tradition of the bowl system is a lie.
In Pepper Johnson's day, the Buckeyes' season wouldn't have gone up in smoke when Illinois won. Saturday's Ohio State-Michigan game would still have been for a trip to the Rose Bowl, the envy of teams all over the nation.
"The national championship is still not out of sight; things can happen with that," safety Jamario O'Neal said last weekend. "But if we have to go to the Rose Bowl, that's what it is, and we're not going to downplay it."
If they have to go to the Rose Bowl?
For anybody older than 30, that sounds like fingernails on a blackboard. Even if we end up with a team that seems more like a champion than those when the polls were the final arbiter, this trade off wasn't worth it.
Bob Hunter is a sports columnist for The Dispatch.
bhunter@dispatch.com
And while we're at it, one for the Babe? LOL!![[Linked Image from i75.photobucket.com]](http://i75.photobucket.com/albums/i302/lrhinkle/d5eaf0b9-e429-4211-b53f-b843bfcf6aa9_zps2ac17420.jpg)
