College Bowls 2000

Bowl season has bowled us over
By Ray Ratto
Special to ESPN.com

The end of the bowl season is always cause for joy, because, and let's be brutally frank here now that the new year is upon us, there are about 23 too many bowl games for our interest level.

That leaves three to care about, and frankly, we run hot and cold on two of them.


	Mississippi State defender Edward Yeates celebrates in the snow.

But they exist, and while most of them end up looking like white noise on an old Dumont, every once in a rare while one will jump up at you and say, "Watch me. I'll be fun, I promise, and you won't even have to know any of the players' names."

And that, after all, is all we want from bowl games that don't directly involve our school right? Let Kirk Herbstreit drone on for all eternity about the verities of Fisher DeBerry or Woody Dantzler. We civilians just want something that will keep us from having to take the tree outside.

Sunday, we got that game, the Independence Bowl. Mississippi State beat Texas A&M, 42-41, in overtime. The Bulldogs (that's Mississippi State, for you virgins) scored two touchdowns in the last eight minutes to tie the game and won in overtime, first by blocking an A&M extra point and running the length of the field and then scoring a conventional touchdown.

We'd give you names, but they wouldn't mean anything to you, unless if course you attended either school or are Kirk Herbstreit. We'd give you more game detail, too, but demur for the same reason.

This was a great bowl game because it was played shin-deep in snow. Snow that fell the entire night. Snow that piled two inches high on Mississippi State coach Jackie Sherrill's cap, making him look even more like a snapping turtle than he normally does. Snow that made every play a potential Three Stooges short.

It was, in short, perfect.

The game was held in Shreveport, La., a place that knows from bad weather, but that didn't provide any particular pregame promise. It surely had nothing on the Red Dwarf marathon on BBC America. It was just another bowl game in an ever growing field, which of course will grow until teams with 4-7 records become bowl-eligible.

“

But then Canada decided to throw up on Shreveport, and boy was Canada sick. The stuff came down without even a moment's abatement, to the point where the field was invisible to the viewing eye. And it kept coming down, all night long. Players slipped and fell as a regular function of their duties. Kickoffs went 12 yards. The most modest of fakes made their users look like Gale Sayers on acid.
It was freakin' beautiful, I tell you. ”

You see, steady snow is the one elemental force that progress hasn't yet beaten. Artificial turf is weatherproofed concrete, and grass fields have now been made to drain so well that you don't get those classic mudders NFL Films like to drop in between Jim Brown retrospectives.

But nobody can plow snow forever, and eventually the plowers in Shreveport threw up their hands and told the two teams, "We're not getting pneumonia on New Year's Eve just for your good time, so you fellas are just going to have to be on your own.

The result was a triumph, making the largely irrelevant into riveting entertainment -- surely superior in every way to the networks' dueling shows of young people dancing before hack bands who are years past their time and waiting for the ball to drop extravaganzas.

Put another way, more people will remember the Independence Bowl than the Baha Men's last nanosecond of visibility.

Put yet another way, more people will remember the Independence Bowl than the MobileAlabamaLasVegasOahuAlohaMotorCityGalleryfurniture.comHumanitarian
MusicCityMicronPC.comInsight.comLibertySunPeachHolidayAlamoSiliconValley Bowl, in which the score was always 33-20 and nobody paid a lick of attention.

Most importantly, the Independence Bowl will make us tune in every bowl game next year, at least long enough to see if the weather stinks. We are like horses in that we can be led to anything (the XFL will be the latest proof of that), but we are not necessarily inclined to bite.

And since the BCS has already succeeded at half its mandate -- to render all but one bowl game utterly meaningless -- the 2000 Independence may have given the second-through-fifth tier bowl game a new life. Give us dreadful weather, give us misery with a scoreboard, give us cornerbacks being blown down the field like tumbleweeds ... we eat it up with a gravy boat.

So we'll give the bowl season one more chance, next year. But we want typhoons. We want locusts and rivers of blood, we want icebergs in the end zones and flesh-eating falcons.

And either we get it, or the Outback has seen the last of us.

Ray Ratto of the San Francisco Chronicle is a regular contributor to ESPN.com

Miss. St. ekes out win in wintry, wild Independence

Confident Stoops, confident team

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