We ate black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day, the way you are supposed to in the South, where my wife and I were raised. We live in Vermont now, but we were told when we were kids to eat black-eyed peas for luck, and why take chances?
They go best, for me, with some football. College football, that would be, in a matchup of two great teams in one of those “traditional” bowl games. The Orange Bowl, perhaps, in Miami, or the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans; the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, say, or the most sanctified of all those games, the Rose Bowl in Pasadena.
This New Year’s Day, there were no bowl games. Blame it on the calendar. January 1 fell on a Sunday, and the Rose Bowl couldn’t be played on the Sabbath for reasons having to do with horses and some sort of late-19th-century ordinance. Hard to imagine California with blue laws, but there it is. So this year, the Rose Bowl (and the Cotton and Sugar, as well) was played on January 2. And to my taste, the games were not the same without the peas, just as the peas had not been the same without the games.
Sure, there was professional football to watch on New Year’s Day. But no regular-season NFL game could match the innocent exuberance of the legendary bowl games, still talked about by aficionados of the sport. Like Texas and Southern Cal in the 2006 Rose Bowl—a game that Texas won 41 to 38 with a last-minute touchdown. USC was playing for its third consecutive “national championship,” and it was the last game that Keith Jackson ever broadcast, which was of moment to all serious fans of college football.
And then there was the 1984 Orange Bowl, when Nebraska, behind 31-30, went for a 2-point conversion to win the “national championship” against Miami and came up short. Not to mention the 2007 Fiesta Bowl, when Boise State—Boise State?—beat Oklahoma 43-42, in overtime. And on and on, back into the mists of football time and legend.
There were, sadly, no such games on New Year’s Day. No bowl games at all, whether nail biters or blowouts. And it felt like the only day since about, oh, Thanksgiving when where wasn’t a college bowl game of some sort being played in some forgettable location between two undistinguished teams.
There had been, for instance, the Gildan New Mexico Bowl back on December 17, in which the Roadrunners of the University of Texas at San Antonio played the University of New Mexico Lobos, who won the game 23-20. There followed, among others, the Popeyes Bahamas Bowl played in Nassau, the Dollar General Bowl played in Mobile, Alabama, and the Camping World Independence Bowl, played in Shreveport between North Carolina State and Vanderbilt, teams with identically mediocre records of 6-6. It was once rare for a team playing in a bowl to have lost more than a game or two. But when you have to field teams in 41 bowl games, you take what you can get including, even, a couple of teams with losing records.
The word “glut” seems somehow inadequate here.
Still, the games and—more important—the broadcasts go on. There is sponsorship money and there is television revenue, even when the stadiums are half empty. Probably because TV viewers know that at least some of the games will offer more surprises and twists than anything else they could find to watch. There are only so many Law & Order reruns you can watch, and, who knows, maybe you will luck into Appalachian State’s exciting victory over Toledo in the Camellia Bowl.
When college football is good, it is an emotional feast. You find yourself transported into a state of some kind of emotional bliss even as the rational side of your brain may scoff. After all, there are the cheerleaders, the bands, the screaming fans, the mascots. (And, by the way, did you see the Florida State horse, Renegade, take a fall before kickoff in the Orange Bowl? Fortunately, both horse and rider were okay, and the warrior’s spear was planted on the 50-yard line according to ritual.) It all seems so gloriously pointless, but still, when you hear the first notes of your school’s fight song and see the players come through the tunnel in their colors, the atavistic synapses fire, the old tribal instincts surge, and for a couple of hours, you are transported.
With so many bowl games, there were bound to be stinkers and yawners. But there were also some gems, even with teams that had been only marginally successful during the regular season. Stanford, for instance, edged (as they say) North Carolina in the Hyundai Sun Bowl, 25-23. Interestingly, Stanford’s star running back Christian McCaffrey did not play. He chose not to risk an injury that might have damaged his standing in the upcoming NFL draft. So the game, like all of them, depended to a very large degree on players who are not in it for the money. Not the big money, anyway.
Another notable star who chose not to play in his team’s bowl game was Leonard Fournette of LSU, who had been, like McCaffrey, a Heisman Trophy candidate. Fournette’s teammates got along fine without him in the Citrus Bowl and beat Louisville and its quarterback, Lamar Jackson, who did, in fact, win the Heisman.
If the bowl games proved nothing else, they did establish that football is a team sport.
Those games were all a prelude to the big New Year’s Eve showdowns, the Peach Bowl and the Fiesta Bowl, which serve as semifinals in the ad-hoc playoff system to determine the national champion. The winners will meet on January 9 and play for the right to say “We’re number one.”
This is a matter of inestimable importance to many fans. It has also been a matter of enormous controversy over the years. The best college football could do was to rely on newspaper polls, which led to a lot of arguments. Who made the hacks at the AP kings or gods? Eventually the computer was brought in to ameliorate the “human element,” which, however, was still present. This arrangement was known as the Bowl Championship Series (1998-2013), and may have caused even more arguments, until it was superseded two years ago by the College Football Playoff—essentially, a selection committee (membership includes Condoleezza Rice) with a duty to:
- Rank the top 25 teams and assign the top 4 to semifinal sites;
- Assign teams to New Year’s bowls;
- Create competitive matchups;
- Attempt to avoid rematches of regular-season games and repeat appearances in specific bowls;
- Consider geography.
This season, the committee determined that the four playoff teams would be Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State, and Washington. There were arguments. Of course there were. Why did Ohio State, for instance, get chosen over Penn State, which had won when the two played each other and also finished first in their conference, the Big Ten? Well, Penn State had lost two games, and Ohio State only the one. This was typical of the arguments that fans have pressed with trial-lawyer intensity.
Well, anyway, the finalists were set and no argument would change that. Alabama and Washington would play in Atlanta in the Peach Bowl and for the longtime fan and student of the college game, there was a strong element of nostalgia in this matchup. Those schools had played each other in the 1926 Rose Bowl, in a game that was the genesis of the Alabama football tradition.
The Rose Bowl was already an institution by then, and its sponsors would invite two teams to play—one from the west coast, the other from the east. The winner could claim to be the best in the land. At the end of the 1926 regular season, the committee asked Dartmouth to come out and play Washington. The invitation was declined. Feelers went out to Princeton and others, but they were politely turned down. Alabama was, finally, invited as, literally, a poor substitute. In those days, the South was still institutionally poor, backward, and barefoot.
But the Alabama team had gone undefeated, and it welcomed the chance to prove it could play anyone. The fans believed in their team with a fervor that went beyond just football. This was about pride and it touched, inevitably, on the Lost Cause. The team traveled four days and 2,000 miles, by train, getting off to run wind sprints at stops along the way, arriving finally in Pasadena not merely as underdogs but also as the country hicks. They won. The final score was 20-19, and that single point marked the advent of Alabama football.
The team that was the underdog in 1926 is today the despised top dog in college football. So they went to Atlanta—a three-hour drive instead of a four-day train ride—played Washington in the Peach Bowl and won easily. For all the committee’s work and the media buildup, it wasn’t much of a game. The final was 24-7, and it was less exciting than that to watch.
But there was still the Fiesta Bowl left and hope that Clemson and Ohio State might put on a show. They had been named semifinalists, after all, by that committee. Clemson blew Ohio State out of the stadium, 31-0. The system had, so far, failed. And the next day, there would be only those black-eyed peas to look forward to.
But still, on January 2, there would be three more games, including the Rose Bowl. This seemed oddly anticlimactic, following the tournament semi-finals with a lineup of what, to many fans, were nothing more than exhibition games. But if you love college football, you will always watch the Rose Bowl which, as the announcers regularly remind us, is the “grandaddy of them all.” The game this year would be between Penn State and Southern Cal: two teams that had wandered in the wilderness of scandal and were on the path to redemption, playing in college football’s most hallowed game. (USC’s first Rose Bowl victory, in 1923, had been against Penn State.) So even without the black-eyed peas, I settled in to watch. Maybe this game would redeem a month of too much inferior football.
And it was a classic. Penn State fell behind early by two touchdowns, and if this had been the NFL, you might have been looking for another game on another channel. But Penn State rallied and was behind by only 27-21 at the half before breaking loose for 28 points in the third quarter. Then, USC—down 49-35—mounted its comeback, scoring two touchdowns and a field goal to win. Final score, 52-49. It was one of those games that leave the fan feeling depleted and spent.
There had been no national championship at stake. Or anything else, really. But that wasn’t the point. And you might say that there really wasn’t any point. They played to win and they played all-out. For the fan, that is what counts, and the bowl games still come through, just often enough. A columnist for the New York Daily News wrote that it was “a truly incredible Rose Bowl from start to finish. For a totally meaningless game, that is.”
The man doesn’t get it and should look for other work.
As of this writing, it now remains only for Alabama and Clemson to settle things in Tampa on January 9. These same teams played last year for the national championship and Alabama won a thriller. Kickoff is at 8:30 p.m.
Too late, sadly, for black-eyed peas.
Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.
