Every single year, one of the bowls that always catches my attention is the Holiday Bowl in San Diego. By nature, it’s an exciting game since it pits the 2nd place team in the Pac-10 against the 3rd place team from the Big 12. That means you’re usually seeing two top-20 teams that won anywhere from 8-10 games during the regular season. This year, it’s Arizona State going up against Texas. So if the Holiday Bowl provides an excellent game annually, why is it so bad for the Pac-10? I’ll tell you.
Can you name any other bowl of significance played this far in advance of January 1st? Squaring up on December 27th I’d expect to see a MAC and WAC team, not the 2nd place team from the Pac-10 and 3rd place team from the Big 12. This sort of game deserves to be on New Years Day, or at worst, New Years Eve. Secondly, the match up is an inherent display of inferiority on the part of the Pac-10. Regardless of whether or not the conference has two fewer teams, by agreeing to have their second place team play another conference’s third place team, it’s a sign of inferiority. Seriously, what sort of exposure is it for the conference when the only team the rest of the country gets to see play is on January 1st in the Rose Bowl? The Pac-10 needs to get itself together, move the Holiday Bowl to a later date, and find a conference that will match two equals. Until that point, the Holiday Bowl will always serve as a joke for the Pac-10, marring its collective attempt at gaining national respect.
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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 27th, 2007 and is filed under College Football. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Larry, I agree completely.
With the championship game moving later and later every year, it would be easy for the Holiday Bowl to move to Jan. 1 or later.
The Pac-10 has horrendous bowl tie-ins. Not just the Holiday Bowl, but the others too.
The powerful Tournament of Roses committee probably has the Pac-10 schedule the Holiday Bowl with as big a time difference as possible from the Rose Bowl game.
If it were a more respected bowl, the Pac-10 team would show up ready to play more often, instead of being disinterested because they so many times feel slighted out of a BCS Bowl (see Cal in 2004 and Oregon in 2005)
And, yeah, the Pac has terrible bowl tie-ins, partly due to the fans reluctance to travel and partly due to the late Tom Hansen being commissioner.
Yes, the conference has awful tie-ins, but with last night’s beating, it would help if Pac-10 teams not named USC would win some bowl games nowadays — no matter when or where they are played.
ASU and UCLA are down, I don’t think Oregon will beat South Florida with Brady Leaf at QB, and Cal is on such a bad slide that it’s lucky to be in a bowl game. The conference could be 0-4 headed into the Rose Bowl and I wouldn’t be surprised.
[...] The problem is that the Pac-10, as a conference in and of itself, provides the second best football to the SEC these days — they just don’t do bowl games well as of late, unless said team in the bowl game is USC, and that’s only reinforcing the popular perception across the rest of the country that the Pac-10 in football is the Trojans and a bunch of hangers-on. I understand what Larry’s getting at when he griped about the Holiday Bowl being well before New Year’s Eve and/or Day for the Pac-10, but I sense the non-USC teams would do well to actually win the bowls they are tied to with some regularity before getting some changes going. [...]
I thought you were going to say that the Holiday Bowl ruins the Pac-10’s rep because the Pac-10 participant usually gets destroyed.
The 3rd best big 12 school is 7-3 in the last 10 Holiday Bowls.