College football playoff isn't a new idea

The 1960s are a romanticized era of sports, best remembered in sepia tone.

They were also a pretty good time to start a college football playoff, if you asked one prominent member of the coaching community. Radio host Vin Smith, also known as The Midnight Bookworm, writes in:

I recall some 41 years ago, Glenn Dobbs Jr. was coach at Tulsa. I interviewed the man drafted first in the old All American Football Conference (even ahead of another quarterback named Otto Graham). Glenn was angry over the fact that there was no playoff in college football. The college game puts the pro game to shame in every way except management, not just the BCS, but the NCAA in general.  More fans sit in the stands for the 119 or so Division 1-A schools than could possibly attend the pro games. Add all the other levels of college football, and you have the greatest of all team sports.

Who would have thought that a movement in the Obama era has its roots in the LBJ era?

-- Adam Rose
Photo of Dobbs in his playing days via lifeinlegacy.com.

Comments

[gerrrg]

25 years ago, New Years Day was very different from what it is now. I remember big family parties where three different televisions were each showing a different bowl game. You'd walk into the main living room and see the Cotton Bowl going on, and then walk into the extended patio area to see the Tangerine Bowl.

It was a spectacle to be able to fill your belly with good food, and watch bowl game after bowl game, nonstop, the afternoon.

That's the kind of tradition I miss.

Jump forward to the new Millennium and now, instead of several bowl games on New Years Day, we have an extended bowl-watching saga that stretches for a week. There is no tradition in coming home from work and watching a bowl game on a Tuesday. That's just another bowl game to watch.

When the BCS became reality, the Cotton and Tangerine (now the Capital One Bowl) lost a whole lot of luster. When bowl games went all out commercial, they lost their soul. It was no longer the Sun Bowl; it became the Brut Sun Bowl (with a lot of iterations in between). The Cotton Bowl transformed into the Mobil Cotton Bowl to the SBC Cotton Bowl, and now the AT&T Cotton Bowl.

Which makes you wonder...will the "Rose Bowl presented by Citi" become the "Rose Bowl presented by the corporation formerly known as Citi, now bailed out by the Feds"?

This New Years Day, if you don't have ESPN, will there be a bowl game to watch on the tele?

[manlaw]

Very True........but, with a name like Trojan, who could they go wrong?