Giants 17, Patriots . . . 14

Something is very wrong with me, I think.

I've been handed so many gut-ripping defeats in the last seven years (Yankees 2001, 2003, 2004; USC v. Vince Young, vs. UCLA 2006, vs. Stanford this year; Patriots v. Denver two years ago, Colts last year, Giants tonight) I believe I'm getting acclimated to the feeling.

Before the game, I pondered this thought: I made it to the age of 30 loving only one single team: Larry Bird's Celtics. (The nasty 1970s Yankees of Munson, Guidry and Reggie could be admired, but never, ever loved). Then, in the past 12 years, Torre's Yankees, the Jake Plummer/Pat Tillman Sun Devils, the Brady/Belichick Patriots, and Pete Carroll's Leinart/Bush/White/Cody/Tatupu Trojans.

Four teams loved in a single decade. (At one point, from 2002 through the Vince Bowl, the Patriots and Trojans combined for an astounding 111 straight games without a loss of lasting significance, defined as any loss ending all championship hopes.)

A harvest. A lifetime crammed into twelve years.

But two lessons learned along the way.

1. There will always be a price for caring.

2. It hurts more to lose than it feels good to win.

In the past dozen years, I have gone into for contests thinking, This is the game. I've made a pact with God: allow them this win, and the next two decades can hang themselves.

1997 Rose Bowl, and Jake Plummer's dream season.

2001 World Series Game 7, and the Yankees' quest for four straight World Series rings and canonization as the greatest team ever.

2006 Rose Bowl, and the quest for a Three-Pete.

Tonight's Game.

Result: 0-4.

Tonight's oddly enough, not as bad as I thought.

So maybe I'm getting used to it.

Which worries me, I guess.

Ohio St. v. LSU

Which, all told, was about as good as we could have hoped for.

One could make the argument (and the argument has been made) that USC is playing as well as anyone right now, but in college football that's irrelevant. There was no shame in losing to Oregon on the road--back when Oregon was number two, half the Trojan starters were in the hospital, and Dennis Dixon was sprinting toward New York and the Heisman Trophy--but losing to Stanford was just inexcusable, a breakdown in playing, coaching and good judgment all at once. (Someone explain to me again why Booty was out there to throw four second-half interceptions with a broken thumb, with a perfectly competent back-up in Mark Sanchez standing on the sidelines? Oh, right: Drew Bledsoe had once won a Patriots' game with a broken finger while Pete Carroll was head coach. Nice to know Carroll can, from time to time, draw on his fantastic success in the NFL.)

Anyway, and this goes back to 2003 and continues to this day: it is hard to feel bad when your team is headed to the Rose Bowl.

Of greater concern is the screw job put on Arizona State, who lost two games (to Oregon-with-Dixon and the everybody's-back-and-healthy Trojans), and for whom the Kansas Jayhawks would be thin gruel.

In the hours before Fox's selection show (which show was lousy, by the way: where was the interview with Pete Carroll with the requisite spray of roses in the background?), the only real question had come down to the Fiesta, ASU v. Kansas. I posted this comment on The Irish Trojan:

I was home in the Valley over Thanksgiving, and all I heard was that the Fiesta Bowl committee presently has some sort of animus toward Arizona State, and that the powers of Phoenix and Glendale (remember, the game was moved across the Valley last year, from Tempe's Sun Devil Stadium to Glendale's University of Phoenix Stadium) were quietly (should last night's events take place) urging the committee to choose an out-of-town team, in order to boost hotel and restaurant dollars.

If the first part of the above is true, it's nuts, as the whole reason the Fiesta Bowl was created back in the day was to give Arizona State some national attention. (The Devils played in five of the first seven Fiesta Bowls, winning four.) No ASU, no Fiesta Bowl.

If the second part is true, it's a shame, for one would think that civic pride would prevail.

I don't know how true any of this is true. But I'll be keeping it in mind this evening.

And then came the announcement.

Well, Kansas has one loss. And the entire non-Manhattan state of Kansas will point their Winnebagoes and tractors Phoenix- and Glendale-ward on Christmas week, and fill the greater coffers of Phoenix and Glendale buyin' sparkly things and all them talkin' picture boxes.

Was Arizona State the victim of a travelism? Maybe.

Was the animus toward ASU part of the equation? Maybe.

What is undeniable is that, when it comes to the Pac-10, the BCS always seems one slot short.

Courtesy the Irish Trojan, a more conspiratorial take here.

A Fine Mess

Well, ASU hangs on.

And everyting else . . . mercy.

Nationally, numbers one and two lose.

Ohio State goes from five to (presumably) one by not playing.

Two conference champions (LSU and Oklahoma) will finish, in the BCS, behind two teams in their conference that didn't even qualify for the championship game (Georgia and Kansas, respectively).

An attempt to sort it out here.

Championship Saturday . . .

. . . Which is quickly replacing NFL Conference Championship Sunday as my favorite sports day of the year.

First quarter, USC 7, UCLA 0.

Third and sixteen . . . and Joe McKnight drops the ball.

And a missed field goal.

Well, this is a big red-letter day so far.

Now UCLA punts . . .

USC recovers . . .

Okay, this is what happens when you try to keep up. Booty intercepted . . .

And USC gets the ball back almost immediately.

End of the first quarter.

I know USC is a slow-starting team, but this is ridiculous. Why this game isn't 21-0 already I have no idea.

In other news, Navy defeated Army 38-3, a game significant for two of the coolest moments in sports: the playing of the National Anthem while the Middies and Cadets stand at attention, and then the playing of the schools' alma maters after the game, while the two teams stand as one. Fabulous stuff.

Va Tech over Bocton College . . . to secure the Orange Bowl, probably no chance for anything more even if all the dominoes fall.

Tennessee 7, LSU 6. One of three games that could push USC back to glory.

Maybe.

Booty fumble. SC recovers. Mercy.

3rd and 12. Timeout.

Still ahead: Missouri v. Oklahoma, West Virginia v. Pitt, and the Territorial Cup: Arizona State v. Arizona. Robbie-Boy checks in with this analysis:

ASU has got to run the ball. If they can get push from the O-Line and pop Keegan and Nance for some nice gains, ASU wins going away.

The Sun Devils are ranked FIRST in the nation for Time of Possesion. They have got to keep that hybrid poor-mans version of the spread run by ConcussionTama off the field. That's how you beat a gimmick offense.

Update: Filed under "Boy, that was dumb, but I'm glad it happened . . ." having stopped USC on third down for about the 27th time so far this game, a UCLA defender performs some weird roughing/late hit/facemask maneuver on Booty, a personal foul so blatant not even a Pac-10 official could miss it. Automatic first. Chauncey Washington, in for the score. 14-0, USC.

UCLA gets the ball back . . . after a kickoff goes out of bounds, which play goes unremarked by either announcer, nor why the ball is spotted at the 35. No matter; UCLA doesn't come close to not going 3-and-out.

Update: After a late second-quarter TD by UCLA, USC's lead is now 17-7, third quarter.

Dennis Erickson should send Steve Sarkisian a boquet of roses; the pattern for USC is: run for 15 yards, runs for twelve yards, pass pass pass punt. USC's O-line is blowing UCLA off the ball; McKnight and Washington are constantly a half-step from breaking one . . . and Sarkisian keeps going to a Booty, who is clearly off-target today.

Punt.

(Note: The laptop ran out of batteries and erased the rest of the third quarter.

Which is just as well.)

Update: Unbelievable. A second God-that-was-dumb, etc. moment. USC has the ball on the two, third-and-goal, runs up the gut, is stopped. Fourth and goal--except, USC is flagged for holding.

Let us linger on this moment, because if UCLA had fired Karl Dorrell yesterday and hired the drunkest brother of Sigma Chi to coach the Bruins today, they'd be in better shape as of this moment. Frat Boy would have declined the penalty, given SC the ball fourth-and-goal at the two, and put the onus on Carroll: go for it (the Trojans were stuffed the last time, and does anyone think Carroll would do anything but run a tailback behind Baker?); (Has Carroll, for all his stones, ever done anything else on fourth and short?); or else kick a field goal and leave UCLA with a chance to win with two touchdowns.

No: Dorrell accepts the penalty, which actually gives Booty more space. Sarkisian calls for an iso play--All-American tight Davis vs. a linebacker; Booty dumps the ball off, Davis leans forward and scores. 24-7. Game over.

As a Trojan of good standing, I can't believe my good fortune. GAME OVER.

Update: Rose Bowl, baby. Freaking Rose Bowl.

Some kind of season.

ASU v. Arizona: the meanest rivalry, one year later

(My first reprise: with the Fiesta--or perhaps Rose--Bowl on the line, a look back to my post of a year ago: The Meanest Rivalry).

Tomorrow the college football nation will be treated to a special game: the, by all available evidence, meanest rivalry in college football.

Arizona State v. Arizona.

There are older rivalries (Lafayette-Lehigh, Harvard-Yale). There are more historical rivalries (Army-Navy). There are rivalries with more National Championship implications (Ohio State-Michigan, Notre Dame-USC, Texas-Oklahoma). And there are rivalries that produce better games (Notre Dame-USC again, plus Oklahoma-Texas again and, until recently, Miami-Florida State).

For sheer unvarnished hatred, however, perhaps only Alabama-Auburn can crowd the annual Thanksgiving-weekend tilt between the Sun Devils and Wildcats.

This fact may come as a surprise to most people, who associate Arizona with Lute Olson's basketball teams and think of Arizona State as the place Pat Tillman attended two decades ago. But as a veteran of USC-UCLA, USC-Notre Dame, and as someone who has seen both UT-A&M and Ohio State-Michigan fans up close, I can testify: nothing, nothing matches Arizona State-Arizona for sheer unvarnished ugliness.

My younger brother Robbie-Boy once put the ASU-UA game in perspective. He told me he'd spoken to an alumnus of the so-called Big Game, Stanford-Cal, and was told, "Sure, it's a rivalry, and we want to win. But we have friends on the other side from college and we spend the days before the game wine-tasting and going out to dinner. It's part of the fun." Such behavior would be unthinkable between Sun Devil and Wildcat fans, who, starting four hours before game time, begin eyeing one another from one tailgate party to another like panthers circling the same watering hole.

The fist-fights come later, on and off the field.

The hatred has grown in two stages, and its story is a lovely sliver of college football history. The man most deserving of credit (or blame, as you will) is Frank Kush, the coach who put ASU on the football map in the late sixties and early seventies. It was Kush--along with a slew of quality quarterbacks, including Danny White, Dennis Sproul, Fred Mortenson, and Mark Malone--who made Arizona State a football power. A writer in previous generation once said, "For me, college football gives out west of New Haven and doesn't pick up again until Palo Alto." In Kush's early years, the flyover area was shorter: college football gave out west of Lincoln, Nebraska, and didn't pick up again until Los Angeles. And so it was, until Kush's Sun Devils emerged in the desert and introduced not only to a team but an entire region to the rest of the country.

I was barely old enough in the middle seventies to remember the extent of the bias against Arizona State and other small schools in distant regions. Today's so-called East Coast bias (it is really an L-shaped bias, starting in Ann Arbor, stretching south to Austin, then east through Alabama to Gainesville) has not a patch on football in the seventies, during which the NCAA held a stranglehold on television rights and restricted broadcasting not only to a handful of games, but the same games every year: USC-Notre Dame, Ohio State-Michigan, Pittsburgh-Penn State, Oklahoma-Nebraska. Arizona State was turning out first-rate team after team in virtual anonymity; two months into almost every season, Kush's teams would be 6-0 and perhaps eighteenth in the country, behind many teams with one loss and a few (an Alabama or an Ohio State) with two. A single loss, and ASU would drop out of the Top 20 (as it was called back then). It is hard to remember, but well to remember, that much of the reason the Fiesta Bowl came into being was to gain Arizona State national exposure; the original contract was for the Fiesta Bowl to feature "the WAC champion," but in those days everyone knew who that would be.

It is also well to remember that, in those days, the hatred between Arizona State and Arizona was mostly confined to one day a year. Frank Kush did his level best to express his loathing of all things Bear Down: refusing to land at the Tucson airport when recruiting the latest stud from Amphitheatre High School, for instance. But mostly the fans of both teams (the Devil fans especially) wanted their school to beat the other without wishing the other school ill against, say, UTEP. As a kid whose parents took him to ASU games six Saturday evenings a year, I remember when the PA announcer at Sun Devil stadium would read the days' scores, an Arizona win would be greeted with general applause.

That all changed when the rivalry moved uptown, in successive stages. Stage One was The Game, which featured The Catch. In 1975 Arizona State came into the game 10-0 and flirting with the outer edges of the Top Ten for the first time ever; Arizona, for its part, was 9-1 and ranked 17th. This was the first time in the rivalry where a victory by either side would secure a bowl berth. What followed was the greatest ASU-UA game ever, a 24-21 victory by Arizona State featuring a lunging, diving touchdown catch by sophomore wide receiver John Jefferson. (It was a foretelling of the bitterness to come that, starting then, and to this day, certain Wildcat quarters claimed the catch was a trap.) In the Fiesta Bowl a month later, Arizona State pulled off not only a fabulous upset, but one of the most consequential games in college football history, a game to rank with Notre Dame's defeat of Army in 1920 or Miami's upset of Nebraska in the 1984 Orange Bowl. ASU's 17-14 victory over Nebraska was consequential in the way the other games were: not just introducing a heretofore unsung football power, but literally moving the center of the sport. Notre Dame introduced the country to the football of the Midwest, and specifically to Knute Rockne's Irish; Miami established the primacy of Florida. In the final 1975 tally, Arizona State jumped from number 7 to number 2 in the rankings (many said it deserved the whole macaroni); more importantly, its victory introduced an entire nation to football in the Mountain Time Zone, to Arizona and Colorado State, to Brigham Young and Utah, to Boise State and Air Force. Every time one of these schools finds itself on ESPN or in a BCS Bowl, it should throw up a silent prayer of thanks to Frank Kush.

The events of 1975 were far-reaching in another way, and became the catalyst for the Pacific-Eight to extend an invitation to ASU and Arizona to enter the conference, thus becoming the first of the large conferences to alter itself in any meaningful way. Over the next thirty years, the Big East would be formed, Penn State would join the Big 10, Arkansas would leave the Southwest Conference for the Southeast Conference, the Big Eight would become the Big 12, the SWC would be smashed into half-a-dozen pieces, and--in the last few years--a dozen schools would switch allegiances for an upgrade in status.

It was this trade-up in class that brought the rivalry to Stage Two. Suddenly, both teams were fighting for the Rose Bowl--or rather, Arizona State was, and Arizona was obsessed with playing the spolier. The nastiness reached its present level in the early 1980s, when twice (1982 and 1985) ASU needed to beat or tie Arizona to advance to the Rose Bowl. Both times ASU lost, and both times the sheer joy Arizona took in denying the Sun Devils laid the hatred bare. It was along this time that Arizona State began losing almost every year to Arizona--usually under the most freakish circumstances--that it became clear that Arizona, a basketball school in a football conference, saw its entire season in terms of a single game, Arizona State on Thanksgiving Friday or Saturday. This, then, has been the dynamic of the ASU-UA rivalry for going on a quarter-century: Arizona State, almost always the better team, looking to use the game for a stepping-stone to a bowl, or a better one; and Arizona, almost always the weaker team, taking malicious delight in every bad bounce, every tipped pass, every bad call (and in the Pac-10, the calls can be atrocious).

I have been to four Fiesta Bowls, two Rose Bowls, a Cotton Bowl. I have been at Yankee Stadium for a Yankees-Red Sox double header, been at Fenway Park when Jose Canseco came to bat, sat in the bleachers to watch the Angels come to within one pitch of the World Series, and lose. I have seen Cubs fans up close, and learned the truth of the adage that the Cubs aren't a baseball team so much as an excuse to drink in the afternoon. And nothing--nothing--beats the sheer raw hatred of Sun Devils for Wildcats, or vice versa. And at 5 pm central time tomorrow, I'll turn on my TV and feel a little of that hatred for myself.

Three words.

Skin the Cats.

BCS

So . . . how does a USC-Hawai'i Fiesta Bowl grab you?

A Kansas-West Virginia National Championship game?

Today was just the latest in the craziest college football season in memory.

Consider:

*Two dramatic, BCS-affecting upsets (Arkansas over LSU, Texas A&M over Texas), one of them in a rivalry game, and both winning coaches (one for sure, the other almost certainly) headed out the door in dual jump-or-be-pushed scenarios, both of said coaches are involved in separate off-the-field kerfuffles best described, both of them, as bizarre.

*The team with the second-to-easiest schedule in the country plays the team with the third-to-easiest schedule in the country--and the game has major BCS implications.

*Kansas--at this moment in time--is essentially the number one team in the country, and yet no one gives it any chance at all to survive the next eight days with more than the Orange or Sugar Bowl as a consolation prize. Probably correctly.

*Three years ago, Cal, with one loss (and that by six points, on the road, to the undefeated Leinart/Bush/Lendale/Tatupu/Cody/Jarrett Trojans) was left out of the BCS in favor of the Vince Young/Cedric Benson Longhorns, who themselves had one loss (by twelve points, on a neutral site, to the Jason White/Adrian Peterson Sooners). Now teams with two or three losses (a considerably not-as-good Trojans team, first and foremost) find themselves in the catbird seat, and little seems to stand between Hawai'i (which played a weaker schedule than Odessa Permian) and a fat New Year's payday. Yes: the extra BCS game is a factor. However, between 2001 and 2005--a five-year span--we were treated to four BCS Championship games featuring two undefeated teams from major conferences, and in one case an undefeated from a top-tier conference (Auburn, 2004), on the outside looking in, and probably incorrectly. (Would Auburn have fared better against USC than 55-19? Probably.)

The moral? The era of the super-team is on hold. In 2004 we spent four months waiting for USC-Oklahoma; likewise in 2005 with USC-Texas. This year? Does Kansas-West Virginia grab you? Missouri-Ohio State? Brother.

*As for USC-ASU. In Sun Devil Stadium yesterday, enjoying my Thanksgiving dinner out behind Packard Stadium (my brother's father-in-law brought the game he'd shot: pheasant, grouse, and so forth), I reached an inner peace about the whole affair. Strange how my mood seems to affect USC games. 2002 against Notre Dame and (in the Orange Bowl) Iowa, I was quietly confident. Two blowouts. 2003: the Rose Bowl. Quietly confident, USC whallops Michigan. 2004: Oklahoma, a kind of "well, let's see what happens" attitude. Result? 55-19. 2005: Absolute, infinite, obsessive insanity from about Labor Day on, as I realize USC and Texas are headed for a collision course. Result? The Vince Bowl.

Last year: the Rose Bowl. Even keel. USC blowout.

So: my lesson learned. Even keel is good luck. So: yesterday, I went with my Sun Devil family to enjoy my repast, the gorgeous weather, and see what happened.

Then USC took the kickoff, marched smartly down the field and scored.

And I knew the game was over. I knew the game was over because finally, finally the team that we might term the post-Jarrett era was hitting on all cylinders and playing the way their press clippings claimed they would play.

To look over the season. Idaho State was basically a scrimmage. Nebraska (a far worse team than we thought) was won when Carroll simply abandoned the passing game altogether, and rammed the ball down the Blackshirts' throats. Then the injuries piled up, complacency set in; the Stanford game (or something like it) was inevitable. Arizona was close. Notre Dame: next.

In the end, Oregon was an unfortunate happenstance, a loss against a better team, a hard pill to swallow, as it represented the end of USC hegemony lasting all the way back to the fifth game of 2002.

And then? The Cal game might have been the fulcrum, the game that saved the Trojans from (ick) El Paso. And then there was last night, with some crucial pieces (COUGHsambakerCOUGH) back in play. At 7-0, it was over. At 7-7 (with the fluke of a kickoff runback) it was over. Booty had all the time in the world, and Carpenter didn't. And that was your ballgame.

USC v. ASU: one day to go

It is, at this moment, well to remember the first meeting between the same schools as Pac-10 rivals, 29 years ago this fall. USC had come in the 1978 season off what, for the Trojans at the time, was a dreadful '77 campaign, an 8-4 season salvaged only by a thrilling victory over UCLA (this pushed UCLA from the Rose Bowl all the way out of the bowl picture altogether, while sending Washington--featuring quarterback Warren Moon--to the Rose Bowl, in which they defeated Michigan in a wild New Year's Day that sent number five Notre Dame, led by quarterback Joe Montana, all the way to number one); followed by a victory in something called the Astro-Bluebonnet Bowl, a tilt not long for this world.

Arizona State's status, at that moment, was best appreciated by taking in their previous three years. In 1975 they had pulled off the sort of season that followers of college teams wait 25 years for: an undefeated regular season (featuring a classic victory over a hated archrival--how'd JJ's catch taste, Bear Downers?), followed by a bowl victory over a heavily favored, historically powerful power (a 17-14 thriller over Nebraska in the Fiesta Bowl, a game that ranks among a half-dozen in influencing the course of college football in the 20th century). Sun Devil Stadium (then the host of the Fiesta Bowl) was only a single deck in those days, and held a mere 52,000 or so fans, the Fiesta Bowl had been a sellout, of course (one Phoenix sports anchor memorably described the attending faithful thus: "52,000 fans paid for seats they didn't use much today"), and the rabid nature of the Sun Devil faithful attracted the attention of the nation generally, and the Pac-8 (as was) specifically. This was the game that led to the invitation of Arizona State and Arizona (keeping things even, keeping rivalries intact, etc.) to the Pac, making it the Pac-10.

Understand: this was the first major invite of its kind involving football since the major conferences were formed. The Big 10 had ten teams; the Big 8, eight. The SWC, nine teams from Texas, plus Arkansas. The SEC, Bear Bryant and a bunch of pretenders.

So: this invite was a major thing. To take effect in 1978.

Okay. In 1976, off their Fiesta Bowl win, ASU enters the season number three in the country (the highest pre-season ranking ever, I'm assuming), loses to UCLA 28-10 in a game that deflates the whole season in a way that defies explanation, and finishes 4-7.

1977: In its last year as a Western Athletic Conference (WAC) representative, ASU wins the conference championship, only to meet up with Penn State in the Fiesta Bowl. Penn State pulls off a number of special teams plays and wins 42-30.

Which brings us to 1978. Arizona State is now part of the Pac-10. They have suffered one loss, that to Washington State (Jack Thompson, the Throwin' Samoan), and therefore are 4-1.

USC is undefeated and number two in the country.

USC holds a number of All-Americans at several positions. Anthony Munoz, at left tackle, future NFL Hall-of-Famer. Charles White, tailback, who was just (at this moment) awarded the Heisman. Paul McDonald, quraterback, on his way to a good payday.

And. And. A true freshman named Ronnie Lott is at safety.

And my brothers and I are high in section 219, row 17, seats 1, 2 and 3--the first season my father sprung for season tickets for the entire family.

And? And. Improbably, ASU wins 20-7, in the biggest upset of the season. This would be only loss that USC would suffer in a two-season span, during which time it would go 21-1-1 and get only half of one national championship that year, 1978.

ASU would go on to something called the Garden State Bowl and defeat Rutgers.

And all this I was thinking about today, as we head into maybe the most consequential ASU-USC meeting of all.

USC-ASU: Two days to go . . .

And it only gets better.

Eleven Days Out . . .

And with both teams having a bye next Saturday, it's not too early to talk a little junk re Arizona State and USC, and their Thanksgiving evening tangle . . .

. . . a game I realized last night, as soon as I heard Illinois had beaten Ohio State, that may very well have Rose Bowl implications.

C'mon, Robbie-Boy, how do you size them up?

ASU, USC both win

And, to quote Dick Enberg, Oh my.

All of a sudden those Devil-Trojan tickets I secured months ago now glisten with possibility (bless you, SunDevil Joe).

Will ASU face USC on Thanksgiving Day with the Rose Bowl on the line?

My answer, right now, is yes.

ASU 31, Cal 20

Home from a literary conference bang at 9 pm, Central Time, I sat down to Arizona State with one question to answer. Call it the Butch and Sundance question:

Who are those guys?

I knew Rudi Carpenter, sure. But as the week went along, I was faced with the very real and somewhat embarassing fact that I could not name one other player on the team.

Enter SunDevil Joe.

On that, more in a minute.

But first, in general, a few things impressed me about the Devils:

1. Both times I've seen them this season, the Devils refused to panic when things went south. Tonight, an early ASU turnover resulted in a Cal defensive touchdown. Bang, 7-0. This was followed by two long Cal drives, during which the ASU secondary seemed not only overmatched but downright confused. However, the defense dug deep with the shortened field and held Cal to two field goals. Someone reading the scoreboard, but not watching the game, might find an early 13-0 Cal lead disheartening. Anyone watching the game knew otherwise: ASU was only one touchdown away from getting back into it, whereas Cal had to be wondering why it wasn't ahead 21-0. The fulcrum was Dimitri Nance's first touchdown, which made it 13-7 and announced to everyone, We Officially Have A Game.

2. The cliche of this autumn is: The Red Sox are the new Yankees. It is too soon to tell, but the Devils may, right now, be the new Trojans. Like the Carson/Williams/Leinart/Bush Trojans, they don't panic early, they adjust well, and they hit a fresh gear at about the 10-minute mark of the third quarter. From the fifth game of the 2002 season straight through to the Washington-Stanford-Arizona poo-poo platter, the Trojans were college football's Seabiscuit, the team that might play you even through the backstretch, then turn to you, smile, say, "So long, Charlie," and score, oh, 35 unanswered points. Devil fans well remember a few of those games. Now they get to enjoy them. The longer the third quarter went on, the faster the Cal pocket collapsed, the less time DeSean Jackson had time to get open, the more panicked Tedford's offense (which is predicated on time in the pocket and turning the game into streetball) became, the worse things looked for Cal.

This, more than anything, has to be emphasized: Cal's second-half rash of injuries were not the cause of ASU's dominance, they were the result of ASU's dominance.

3. No, I have to stay on this ASU/USC comparison. The greatest game of my lifetime was the 2005 Orange Bowl: USC 55, Oklahoma 19. There were about eleventy billion things about that game I love, but the one that sticks out was when I knew the game was over. The muffed punt? Jason White's twenty-seventh interception? No, I knew the game was over when the score stood Oklahoma 7, USC 0. White was throwing off his wrong foot falling backwards, Adrian Peterson was being stood up at the line, and Lofa Tatupu and Sean Cody were missing sacks by mere inches. The Sooners converted two third-and-longs on absolute flukes, broken plays turned into cross-field passes. I thought: No way you can play like that for 60 minutes. And sure enough . . .

Now, I didn't know tonight's game was over at 13-0. But I did know the Devils had dodged a couple of bullets and were gaining confidence. They gave Cal a quarter-and-a-half. Not much. But the Bears needed to take it, and they didn't.

4. Big thanks to SunDevil Joe, who provided me with some of the names I needed to watch. A short honor roll: Dimitri Nance (three touchdowns), Keegan Haring (crucial yardage splitting time with Nance); receivers Michael Jones, Kyle Williams, Chris McGaha (how does Rudi love to distribute); and, crucially in the fourth quarter, cornerback Justin Tryon and linebacker Robert James--Tryon, for locking down Jackson as best as anyone could, and both Tryon and James, for coming up with knee-buckling fourth-quarter interceptions on consecutive Cal possessions.

Am I reading too much into two games?

Perhaps.

And Oregon--on the road--looms next week.

But this was some performance.

My first Bleg (Blog plus beg)

So this is Showdown Saturday, Part I.

SunDevil Joe, Blue, Robbie-Boy: I'm starting to warm to the Sun Devils.

I know Rudi Carpenter.

So who else should I know?

I've seen one game, en toto.

What should I look for?

DJ RIP

There are many teams I have admired and cheered for. Before I turned 35, there were three teams I had loved: Joe Torre's Yankees, Larry Bird's Celtics, and--right at the end--Jake Plummer's 1996 Arizona State Sun Devils. (Since then there have been Tom Brady's Patriots and Pete Carroll's Trojans, who between the Patriots' last defeat in 2002 and the Vince Bowl in 2006, played a total of one hundred and eleven consecutive games without a loss of lasting significance. Another story, though.)

I read today of the death of Dennis Johnson, Celtic guard, point guard for (no quibbling, please) The Greatest Basketball Team Of All Time, the 1986 Boston Celtics; co-author of The Greatest Play of All Time, the lay-up that followed Larry Bird's steal of Isiah Thomas's in-bound in the waning seconds of Game 5 of the 1987 Eastern Conference Finals. Bill Simmons, who was there (of course) has an account that distills better than any other the sheer miraculous nature of the play. About seven things had to go right, and did. I've probably seen that play 50 times--more than Bucky Dent scraping one over the Monster, more than The Band is On the Field, more than Leyritz v. Wohlers ("to the track, to the wall, we are tied!"), more than Leinart's audible on Fourth and Nine (more memorable than the Bush Push a minute later)--and, like few things in sports, it always surprises me when it happens.

For many Celtic fans, 1987 consolation season was more memorable that the 1986 season, for many reasons. 1986 was a coronation, a run-away-and-hide year where the Celtics lost one game all year at home and so demoralized the Rockets in Game 6 to win the championship that my two brothers, mother and father and I were toasting their victory with three minutes to go in the game. (You would have to know my family, and its bone-deep superstitions, to know how unthinkable this usually is.) In contrast, 1987 was a year-long street fight, in which the team tried to overcome the loss, one after the other, of Len Bias to death, Bill Walton to a broken shin, Scott Wedman to a ripped-up ankle, and Jerry Sichting to a shooting slump that lasted, basically, until the end of his career.

Never has a defending champion gone through a season with a weaker bench. And never has a team boasted a better starting five, that marvelous band: Bird, Kevin, Chief, DJ, Ainge. And even then the pain did not stop. McHale was on his way to MVP runner-up (no way Magic wasn't going to win it that year) when he broke his foot, decided to play through it, and was never the same again. Parish hurt his foot and played on a limp, Ainge had knee and elbow injuires. Only DJ and Bird survived essentially intact.

The Celtics survived a seven-game scare from Milwaukee, and then a seven-game war with Detroit that ranks better than all but a few finals (New York-LA 1970, Boston-LA 1984, and . . . uh, that's about it). After both teams held serve after two games, providing the way for a best of three, Game 5 was decided by Bird Steals the Ball, an moment so dramatic it overshadowed what happened earlier in the game--namely, Robert Parish decking Bill Laimbeer and getting a no-call in the balance. Game 6 (for which Parish was suspended--coincidentally in a game he probably would have missed anyway with his ankle, and didn't the Pistons scream about that) was a case of the Celtics breaking out to the lead, then giving it up when their starters ran out of gas. (There was a lot of that after 1986.) All of this set the stage for Game 7, which I saw on a black-and-white TV at a friend's house in Long Island City, having come East to visit my presumptive graduate school. I remember the tension before Game 7 as unbearable--the closest any other sport has come close to a really big college football game--and the entire contest seemed to turn on every posession, every shot, every rebound, every (as the Celtics had no bench that year) foul.

I'm exhausted right now thinking about that game. I'm convinced to this day that Larry Bird had decided beforehand to play all 48 minutes, which he did. In any case, he was the author of Boston's walk-it-up play that allowed the Boston starters to grab a few seconds of rest before running the play.

What else? With a tie at the end of the third quarter, starting Detroit forward Adrian Dantley and supersub Vinnie Johnson dove for a loose ball and clattered skulls. Dantley was wheeled off the court on a stretcher and Vinnie Johnson mostly spent the fourth quarter with an ice bag on his head, and went scoreless thereafter. The dagger was near the end, Danny Ainge's fall-away three-pointer that game at the tail end of four consecutive Celtic offensive rebounds. Love those fifth chances. And it was over.

This was the game that gave rise to Zeke's post-game "overrated Bird" comment (Bird's line that game: 48 minutes, 38 points, 20 rebounds--overrated, sure), to the Detroit-Boston hatred that persisted until Boston became so bad (thank you, M.L. Carr) it no longer mattered. And the series overshadowed the the fact that the Celtics--without Bias, without Wedman, without Walton, with McHale on a broken foot and Robert Parish limping on a bad ankle--still pushed the Magic-Kareem-Worthy-Scott-Green Lakers to six games, and lost a series they would have won had it not been for Magic's junior sky hook (which would have been obliterated by Bird's subsequent shot, which missed winning the game by two millionths of an inch. But all credit to the Lakers. They were killers).

Anyway, DJ, who Simmons writes, will someday be in the Hall of Fame, is gone. And--again, as Simmons says--if I was never a part of of his life, I am happy to say that he was a part of mine.

The Fiesta Bowl, Boise State, and the Future (part three of three)

There is no question that, at present, the Fiesta Bowl is one-fifth of a system that is unwieldy at best, and possibly corrupt as well. The BCS is college football's horse-by-committee, a closed shop that manages to strip away most of the traditional rivalries of the bowls while doing nearly nothing to resolve the problem of an identifiable champion. When it works, it does by accident, when there happens to be two undefeated major programs and zero undefeated mid-majors, a Utah or a Boise State. This has happened exactly twice, in 2002 and last year. Furthermore, anyone who thinks that Boise State victory brings us any closer to a playoff should consider that 1975 Fiesta Bowl, which was played the day after Christmas. In those days, with no BCS, schools played their bowls and turned matters over to the voters. Even when number one played number two--as happened with Penn State and Alabama in the 1979 Sugar Bowl--nothing was guaranteed. (Alabama defeated Penn State, but was number two to USC in the UPI Poll by virtue of having lost to USC earlier in the year. USC, at 11-1, lost the only game it would lose over two seasons, to . . . Arizona State.) In 1975, having won the Fiesta Bowl, having beaten a major power, the Sun Devils and their fans had a week to do equations in their heads, thinking, "Well if UCLA beats Ohio State in the Rose Bowl, and if Alabama loses the Sugar Bowl (or even wins unimpressively), and if Oklahoma loses in the Orange Bowl . . . my God, we'll win the National Championship!"

It takes a lot to go from number seven to number one in one week. In fact, it has never happened. But it very nearly happened that year. Alabama won the Sugar Bowl, but in lackluster fashion, and (in Dick Vermeil's final game as Bruin coach)UCLA pounded Ohio State. In those days, the Orange Bowl was always the last game on New Year's Day; most of Sun Devil Nation tuned in, hoping for a miracle. It didn't happen. Oklahoma won, and all of us were treated to final AP and UPI polls that began as follows:

1. Oklahoma (11-1)
2. Arizona State (12-0)
3. Alabama (11-1)

This was the first serious call for a playoff I remember. Bear Bryant, furious for (in his eyes) being robbed of a championship, screamed bloody murder. And this was thirty-one years ago. However, what has happened in the interim--the Bowl Alliance, then the BCS--has been an effort to prevent a play-off, rather than lead to one. The issue is not money; though the Big Six conferences do enjoy their fat guaranteed paydays, there is no question the money would skyrocket if the bowls were somehow lashed to a playoff system. (Think March Madness times ten.) The issue is always, will always be, power. The NCAA has full power to regulate any intercollegiate playoff system; hold so much as a single game that might be called a "play-off" (the so-called "Four- (or Five-) plus-one" scenario, and the Big Six-plus-Notre-Dame will lose their power to include, exclude, negotiate, schedule and divide up the profits among themselves.

(It is precisely because there is no playoff that, despite common misconception, the winner of next Monday's game won't be the "National Champion" of anything, strictly speaking, or even the "Champion" of anything save the BCS. The rough analogy is the Master's Golf Tournament, which unlike the other majors, which crown the national champion of a professional body--the Professional Golfers' Association, say--the winner of the Master's is not the champion of anything but a particular tournament. The Master's is not even a tour event, strictly speaking; all its glory is conferred upon by the players, the media, and the fans of the sport. Which is why Augusta National can talk of requiring a uniform (read: less areodynamic) golf ball without fear of interference from the PGA or USGA.)

When the BCS has been expanded, it has been for no other reason that to forestall Congressional anti-trust oversight. The notion is that an odd Utah or Boise State will keep the hounds at bay. This does little to help us. If Florida manages to defeat Ohio State in any convincing manner, the final BCS standings will probably read as follows:

1. Florida (13-1)
2. Boise State (13-0)
3. Ohio State (12-1)

What can be said for the Fiesta Bowl is that, when a mid-major school attempts to enter the party, it usually uses the Tempe gate. Arizona State was the first to do so. Penn State and Miami gave us the second National Champion crowned in a bowl outside the Original Four (Brigham Young won its lone National Championship by prevailing in the Holiday Bowl in 1984; its finish ahead of 11-1 Washington was helped in no small part by the respectability Arizona State had helped bring to the Mountain Time Zone.) Only two teams outside the Big-Six-Plus-Notre-Dame have ever played in a BCS Bowl. Both have gone to the Fiesta Bowl. Utah did so by going undefeated in 2004; Boise State went this season. Both times their geographical location was actually a benefit; the Fiesta Bowl reasoned, quite correctly, that not only would the fans of these schools buy up their allotment of tickets and any others they could get their hands on, but that thousands of fans without tickets would flood the Valley with their tourist dollars. This brightens prospects for whatever mid-major may manage to run the table: a TCU, a Brigham Young, even--one day--an Air Force, Wyoming, or Nevada. The future will be the opening of the door--just a crack, though. The playoffs are at least fifteen years away, maybe twenty. At least.

The Fiesta Bowl, Boise State, and the Future (part two of three)

It is an effort to list all of the consequences of that single football game.

The 1975 Fiesta Bowl was the game that turned college football on its head, opened up the Pac-8 to the Arizona schools, put the Fiesta Bowl on the map, introduced a college football-watching country to an entire time zone, and helped inch the football world toward an opening-up of television contracts.

(It is hard to remember but well to remember how byzantine the bylaws and contracts were back then. Until the late seventies, neither the Big-10 nor Pac-Ten could send a team to any bowl but the Rose, and so in 1974, for instance, Michigan started the season 10-0, lost to Ohio State, and stayed home. Also, the NCAA negotiated all television contracts, and allowed only a handful of games on the air. Nowadays the Pac-10 and Big-10 send at least ten teams to bowl games, and on Saturdays one can watch college football, uninterrupted, from late morning until past midnight on multiple stations. A single school (Notre Dame) has its own network television contract, for heaven's sake.)

What happened soon thereafter was a realization by many that both the Fiesta Bowl and Arizona State had outgrown one another, and both had outgrown the WAC. Arizona State was ready to challenge for the Rose Bowl, and the Fiesta Bowl was ready to be more than a mere showcase for ASU. In 1978, Arizona State (along with Arizona) moved to the Pac-8, making it the Pac-10; and the Fiesta Bowl, which was contractually allowed to break its ties with the WAC should any team leave the conference (of course, everyone knew the clause had been written with ASU in mind), became free to offer both of its bids to any team that would accept them. This double-bid status became a piece of enormous good luck over the next dozen years, as independents, along with conference champions with no bowl tie-ins, became the Next Big Thing in college football.

A bowl designed for an upstart became an upstart itself, moving to New Year's Day in 1981 as a clear challenge to the Big Four. Soon thereafter, the game became the first to add a corporate title to its name. The Sunkist Fiesta Bowl was born, the appearance purse bulged, and the game became a locus of perennial national consequence. It helped that over a seven-year span, six independents (Miami three times, Penn State twice, Notre Dame once) won the national championship, two of them by winning the Fiesta Bowl. (Had Penn State beaten Oklahoma in the 1986 Orange Bowl, the string would have been seven-of-seven.) The watershed was during the 1986 season, when it became clear that two undefeated independents--Miami and Penn State--would wind up the regular season No. 1 and No. 2. Completely free of any conference tie-in, the Fiesta Bowl went to work, taking the revolutionary step of moving the 1987 game to January 2nd and then fattening the purse. The traditional bowls (especially the Orange, which considered Miami its possession) howled, but the two teams met in that year's Game of the Century. It hardly mattered that the game itself was a dud, aside from the thrill of watching a Miami team full of loudmouths and criminals beaten 14-10 by Joe Paterno's Eagle Scouts (the offensive player of the game was John Bruno, the Penn State punter.) The 1987 Fiesta Bowl was the highest-rated football game to that point, and there was no turning back.

Occasionally, the double-indy system did not work. Sometimes the game was the runner-up bowl; it seemed for half-a-dozen years that Nebraska (by losing to Oklahoma) kept playing Florida State (which kept losing to Miami). And occasionally the greatest schemes fell flat; in 1993, the game set itself up for a re-match of a Notre Dame-Florida State thriller, but Notre Dame spoiled everything by losing to Boston College, and the Fiesta was left scrambling, finally settling on Arizona and a Miami team imploding from a decade's worth of misbehavior. (Arizona breezed, 29-0, in a stinker; on a hunch, my younger brother Rob and I drove to Sun Devil Stadium New Year's morning and bought a pair of field-level seats from two kids unloading their parents tickets. We paid fifteen bucks--total. Try doing that these days.) Often enough, though, the formula did work, and when the wind blew the other way--when Penn State, Miami, Florida State, Pittsburgh, and every other major college program save Notre Dame became conference aligned--the Fiesta Bowl swung back again, and found its way into the Bowl Alliance, and ultimately the BCS, hosting the championship game every fourth year. When the BCS added a fifth bowl, a stand-alone BCS championsip to rotate between the four BCS sites and run a week after New Years', the Fiesta Bowl location (now moved across the Valley to Glendale for the new stadium) was chosen as the first host.

The real loser, as time went on, was the Cotton Bowl: not as nimble, not as spendthift, too interested in landing the Heisman Trophy winner; plus the game is played in a bad neighborhood in, too often, terrible weather. (Don't know why, but New Year's Day in Dallas is almost always miserable: either wet or freezing, and always windy. Just ask Joe Montana.) The founders of the Fiesta Bowl had wanted, more than anything, to convince the country that the Valley of the Sun was as good a place to spend Christmas week as Southern California, Miami or New Orleans. To that extent--and against a dozen bowls that might have beaten them, had any of them been a little more aggressive--they had succeeded.

The Fiesta Bowl, Boise State, and the Future (part one of three)

So this time--for sure--the BCS will reform, right? In the wake of Boise State's spectacular, incredible, excellent, very good Fiesta Bowl comeback against Oklahoma (a game that included both a hook-and-ladder and a Statue of Liberty play, both for scores), we are faced with the very real possibility of the only undefeated Division I-A team--having won a BCS Bowl and beaten four Bowl teams, including Oregon State (which beat USC, which clobbered Michigan, which lost to Ohio State by three points)--ranked second in the BCS come next Tuesday. Surely, then, this will be crystallizing moment, when college football sees the error of its ways and institutes the long-awaited playoff system--four teams, eight, ten?

No. Of course not. The reasons why, in a minute. First, a few words about the Fiesta Bowl, and how appropriate it was that Boise State's classic victory should take place there.

The Fiesta Bowl has always been for upstarts. In the beginning, it was formed by resentful triplets starving for attention: the Western Athletic Conference, Arizona State University, and the powers of the greater Phoenix/Tempe area.

As is recounted in the history of the game, in the late sixties and early seventies, the Western Athletic Conference was growing dissolute about the fact that no prestigious bowl would accept its champion. Football in those days was even more a closed shop than today, as a long-ago (and non-archived) Sports Illustrated article recounts. To paraphrase, outside of a few tie-ins, the power rested neither in the NCAA nor the conferences but in a few powerful schools, which invariably meant that a few coaches-for-life who would set up bowl match-ups between themselves and present the match-up as a fait accompli. (The 1975 Sugar Bowl, between Alabama and Notre Dame, was apparently settled on a single phone call between Bear Bryant and Ara Parseghian.) Arizona State, churning out one undefeated (or one- or two-loss) season after another, was simply shut out, not only from the big four (Rose, Orange, Sugar, Cotton) but from most bowls, most years, period.

The solution--for the WAC, for Arizona State, for the Phoenix community at large (itself tired of feeling like a suburb of Los Angeles, its citizens receiving boring 10-7 Los Angeles Rams shoveathons week after week)--was the Fiesta Bowl. The very existence of the Fiesta Bowl was, as the sixties became the seventies, a close-run thing; throughout the sixties, the only bowl game approved by the NCAA was the Peach Bowl, a game (incidentally) won by Arizona State to make the school even so much as a blip on the college football radar. The Phoenix businessmen who backed the Fiesta Bowl would follow the Peach Bowl's model, and blend the game with endless charity efforts in the Valley of the Sun. The model was presented, and the NCAA approved.

From the start, there was no question of why the game existed. The Fiesta Bowl was contracted to feature an at-large invitee to play "The WAC champion," but it was clear the game was designed by wealthy Phoenicians as a Valley showcase for Arizona State, period. ASU played in five of the first seven Fiesta Bowls, winning four; had the Fiesta Bowl been incorporated (as it should have been) in 1969, ASU would have played in seven of the first nine, and almost certainly won six. The entire country (by which I mean the football-watching country at large) was in ignorance of the squads ASU coach Frank Kush was turning out year after year--which he did, first, by securing the best (not-insignificant) talent between Texas and the Colorado River; and second, by working and drilling said talent until said talent dropped. The ASU training facility in Northern Arizona is called Camp Tontozona; the hellacious mountain to be climbed at a jogger's pace is called, to this day, Mount Kush.

In the first few years, the Fiesta Bowl was between Arizona State and some offensive-minded independent such as Pittsburgh or Florida State. It was a nice sideshow, a flurry of offense in the dry desert Christmas air, right up until 1975, when ASU went 11-0 in the regular season and intruded in on the AP Top Ten, much like an newly minted oil baron might crash the country club.

The andidote, it seemed, was number three Nebraska, who (in the view of paranoid Sun Devil fans; "They're out to screw us" is embedded in an Arizona sports fans' psyche) seemed sent by the nation's football establishment to squash the Devil uprising. Oklahoma or Ohio State or Notre Dame might have worked, but (Devil fans projected) Nebraska would do. Nebraska was 10-1, having lost only to Oklahoma, and only accepted the Fiesta Bowl invitation the second time it was extended.

Compared to Boise State versus Oklahoma, no one can imagine the sense of David v. Goliath that December 26th, 1975, when the team with the sophomore quarterback (Dennis Sproul), the sophomore receiver (John Jefferson), and the stud cornerback (Mike Haynes) took the field against the Great Red Farm Combine.

I was ten years old, and living in Phoenix. The game itself was a classic, and held my family and I spellbound for every minute of its play. ASU scored two field goals early (courtesy of coach's son Danny Kush). Nebraska responded with two touchdowns; then, when Sproul was injured near the goal line, sophomore back-up Fred Mortensen replaced him. Mortenson's first play: a touchdown pass to Jefferson. His second play: a two-point conversion, another pass, this time to Larry Mucker. 14-14.

Fourth quarter: another Danny Kush field goal. 17-14, ASU. With a few minutes to go, the Huskers began a march toward the end zone. Their lineman blew the Devil defenders off the ball, their running backs were pile drivers. My family, assembled before the black-and-white RCA, sat silent, resolved to our team's fate. Nebraska drove the ball to ASU's 31. Quarterback Terry Luck threw two incompletions. On third-and-ten, he completed a pass to fullback Tony Davis, who was hit by two Devils and fumbled the ball. The Devils recovered and ran out the clock.

Bedlam. Sheer insanity.

To this day, Arizona State 17, Nebraska 14 is a score I keep in my head alongside USA 4, USSR 3. When I heard a commentator say, "Well, 52,000 fans paid for seats they didn't use much today," Yes, I thought, and yes. I was ten. I had never loved a team with such innocence, nor ever would again. (My next sports crush, the late-70s Yankees, would introduce me to winning's ugly side.) I had been given a mini-bike for Christmas a day earlier--the greatest Christmas gift of my life; it was a magical week--and, after the game, as my father drove me and my mini-bike out to a place where I could ride, as we listened to hi-lights of the game on his AM radio--especially Mortensen's heroics--I thought, What a team. What a game!

My father chose a spot of desert that, in a few year's time, would be a golf course. As I puttered up and down the hills, as a typically breathtaking Valley sunset broke pink and orange over the distant mountains, I saw my father through the dust, seated in the Country Squire station wagon, smiling as the game commentary played on the radio.

Dennis Erickson to Arizona State

Via The Irish Trojan.

An absolute slam dunk for the Devils.

Norm Chow Arizona State?

So says the Irish Trojan.

I would wish Norm well in any situation, judging him one of the four men (along, of course, with Carroll, Palmer, and Leinart) most responsible for returning the Trojans to glory.

And I would love to see Arizona State (my second favorite team) return to its proper place as at least a second-tier national power (augmented with an occasional Rose Bowl and National Title run).

Something tells me, though, this isn’t the right job for him. The last dozen years have seen offensive geniuses a bit lacking in the charisma department crash and burn when given the reins.

From what I’ve read, though, I think he’s going to have to find this out for himself.