Mike Maloney Maloney uses humor as a
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If the recently completed college football season left you a
little bitter, you’re not alone. This past week proved once
and for all that there is something more annoying in football than
Dennis Miller in the booth, and it’s the BCS. But rather than
fly off the handle ourselves, we thought we’d let our
favorite comedian/least favorite football color man put the
recently completed college football campaign in the proper
perspective.
It’s all yours Denny …
Ңbull;Ӣbull;Ӣbull;
Let me just start off by saying what an honor it is to have my
persona ripped off for some hack sports column in a lame college
rag with readers who are more concerned with 22-across than the
latest whereabouts of Osama bin Laden.
Now, I don’t want to get off on a rant here, but Hurricane
fans aside, can anyone remember a less satisfying college football
season? Between the Bruins’ complete collapse and a bowl
slate less memorable than that balding guy with the moustache on
“Baywatch,” the college football season ended with a
collective belly-flop into the proverbial entertainment pool.
Of course, the créme de la créme of anticlimax was the
BCS Championship game. That was a real beauty, huh? Nebraska looked
more out of place Thursday night than Gary Coleman warming up for
the NBA Slam Dunk Contest.
Now, you may ask, how could the Cornhuskers lose their final
regular season game by almost 30 points, not win their conference
championship and still get a title shot? Who knows? It’s a
lot like trying to figure out how Zack from “Saved By The
Bell” got hired to replace Rick Schroeder on “NYPD
Blue.”
BCS concerns aside, the entire bowl system is out of control. Be
it Toledo versus Cincinnati in the Motor City Bowl, Colorado State
versus North Texas in the New Orleans Bowl, or Marshall versus East
Carolina in the GMAC Bowl, I’m not sure even the alumni and
the students at these schools want to watch this crap. At the end
of the day, 99.9 percent of these postseason extravaganzas carry
about as much weight as Kathy Ireland giving the keynote address at
an International Conference on the Physics of Semiconductors.
There was one team that apparently grasped this concept, and it
was none other than your UCLA Bruins. The boys from Westwood
declined an invitation to the Humanitarian Bowl played in the
tourist mecca they call Boise, Idaho.
And don’t tell me they regretted the decision. Not after
they watched Clemson and Louisiana Tech battle in the midst of a
snowstorm on artificial turf so blue it looked like an entire
village of Smurfs had walked across a minefield right before
kickoff.
Of course, it couldn’t have been easy on the Bruins, who
were forced to stay home for the holidays despite lighting the
college football world on fire with a 6-0 start. Consecutive losses
to Stanford and Washington State saw them sink in the polls faster
than Jabba the Hutt cliff-diving into Lake Tahoe with a lead droid
and the Millennium Falcon tied to his tail.
Things only got worse with the suspension of DeShaun Foster and
an injury report that seemed to grow with every play from
scrimmage. It was clear after the ‘SC game that they had hit
rock bottom. You half expected to hear the voice from VH1’s
“Behind the Music” come over the public address system
and announce that a demoralized Bob Toledo would be checking into
the “Dick Vermeil Football Rehabilitation Clinic” the
next morning. Not good times my friends. Bad times.
Bottom line, whether you were part of the Bruin faithful or not,
when you look back at the 2001 college football season in your
sports almanac of the future, it will probably run under the
headline, “2001: God, it sucked!” But look at the
bright side, the end of the season means no Dick Vitale for nine
whole months ““ it’s gonna be awesome baby! Wait a
second … ah, forget it.
Of course that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong.