Party planner

You're invited (to the real title game)! It's not so impossible ...

By Luke Winn, SI.com

No, that's not a real USC player blowing up the BCS computer ... it's a fake USC player blowing up a fake BCS computer at Universal Studios. The real BCS computers, we're pretty sure, are a little smaller. AP

What started as an uproar over the state of the BCS has dissipated into a dull murmur of disgust. Attribute it to the 3 1/2 weeks we've had to simmer down, or those subliminal messages in ABC's BCS ads on television ("Two good games! Nothing wrong with the system! Hush up and take it!").

Any fixes to the BCS won't happen this year, despite widespread suggestions to add a fifth, Super Bowl-style game to create a playoff scenario for the national title.

How far-fetched would it be, though, to add that extra game this year if USC beats Michigan in the Rose Bowl? Our investigation yielded a reasonable, albeit highly unofficial plan:

DATE: One last college football Saturday. Jan. 10, six days after the Sugar Bowl, nine days after the Rose Bowl.

VENUE: Reliant Stadium, Houston, capacity 69,500.

Where else to host a national title game but the 2004 Super Bowl venue, three weeks before the NFL's main event? Texans playoff dates ... are not a problem. And, I kid you not, the folks at Reliant Stadium are willing to open the doors on short notice.

Shea Guinn, president and general manager of Reliant Stadium, said, "Hypothetically speaking, I think I'd find a way to make it work. Around that time, we're getting ready for a soccer game between Mexican teams, so the grass field would be down, ready to go. We could definitely work something out."

Reliant is slotted to host qualifying matches for the 2004 Copa Libertadores, billed as the Western Hemisphere's version of Europe's Champions League, on Jan. 9 and 11, leaving the field open for our American football event on the 10th. And if Reliant can play host to a houseful of notoriously rowdy Mexican soccer fans, it'll surely be able to manage the lubricated hordes from LSU.

SPONSOR: Not a problem. If the MAC championship can find a sponsor just three days before its game -- Marathon Oil signed up on Dec. 1 for a Dec. 4 Bowling Green-Miami of Ohio contest -- one thinks at least a few major corporations would fight over these naming rights on a week's notice.

This will be a controversial beast -- a non-NCAA sanctioned, non-BCS affiliated bowl game -- so the sponsor must put up a serious hunk of change to organize the event, host it and pay the schools for participating. That cost, however, could be offset by a sizable television deal.

If one title sponsor isn't enough, then spread out the burden. Give four corporations the opportunity to one-up their BCS-affiliated competitors, spawning something like this: "The UPS-T-Mobile-USBank-Pringles College Super Bowl, rendering FedEx, Nokia, Citi and Tostitos' bowls far less meaningful."

Reliant Stadium may be willing to open its doors -- and its roof -- for a real national title game. Brian Bahr/Getty Images

TV DEAL: The BCS is ABC's baby. And this renegade bowl is bound to make ABC and the BCS, which doled out between $56-68 million to the Rose and Sugar Bowl teams, slightly irate. Expect ABC to either boycott, or more likely, respond with a threat from the ABC "family": "This game is happenin' on ABC, or it ain't happenin' at all. Understood?"

CBS and FOX's Jan. 10 NFL playoff telecasts would need to be pushed ahead three hours to accommodate this epic collegiate event (hey, they're doing it for the Sugar Bowl), so either network could still get in the mix. Notre Dame/Gator Bowl specialist NBC would be a long shot, as it tends to rely on Brian Boitano specials for its holiday sports programming.

TRAVEL/TICKETING: Think you can't fill a 69,5000-seat stadium on short notice? In the immortal (here butchered) words of Terrence Mann, "Oh, people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come. They'll come to Houston for reasons they can't even fathom. They'll turn up the interstate, not knowing for sure why they're doing it. They'll arrive at the stadium, innocent as children, longing for a national champion."

The buzz over a wild, groundbreaking, rule-breaking event like this will be so huge that Oklahoma or LSU faithful will jump into cars on Friday night or Saturday morning and make the trip in under six hours. USC fans will take the money they had saved for a flight to New Orleans, and spend it on the hop to Houston. And the sponsor corporations will gobble up the rest of the seats, as they do with real Super Bowl tickets.

The key for selling ducats and travel packages is to have them available right away, once the Rose and Sugar Bowls end. For that, we turn to folks like Steve Yovetich, the vice president and GM for PrimeSport International, which handled this year's Rose Bowl trips and has accommodated Super Bowl fans on a week's notice in the past. And he says it's more than possible. "It just gives it a really small window," he said. "What we've done to counteract that small window is put everything online. By pushing everything online and in real time, you're able to use a really short window to book everything, often 48 hours. A team wins on Sunday night, and you start booking basically the moment the final gun sounds."

There you have it -- the stadium, the sponsor, the TV, the fans, ready to go once the BCS' clock hits 00:00 and our Hypothetical Championship Series begins. The roadblocks to putting this on are too numerous to list, but we're allowed to dream, right?

So when the folks from the BCS tell you one last time that fixing it on the fly is impossible, think of Houston and say, "Actually, it's not that hard ..."

It takes a bigger man to forgive ... I talked with Carl Schneider, the father of suspended UCF quarterback Ryan, via phone about the Golden Knights' recent hire of George O' Leary. If you recall, Schneider's career ended early after he was suspended for, according to his father, "putting a professor's name on a university document, a form that informed professors he was going to be missing class." And if you recall, two years before taking the UCF job, O'Leary lost his new gig at Notre Dame ... for falsifying a rather important document: his resume. The elder Schneider, surprisingly, isn't bothered by the irony of it all. "I've met George O'Leary before, and I think he's an excellent coach," he said. "We think everybody should get a second chance, so we have no problem with him being the coach [at UCF]." But Carl thinks that same philosophy should've applied for his son. "The punishment was a little severe for the situation," he said. The departed QB is now working with a personal trainer in hopes of being selected in April's NFL Draft. As of Dec. 29, he had not yet been invited to any of the senior all-star games.

Jason White will keep Paul Thompson (right) on the pine for another season. AP

Amid the excitement at Oklahoma over the news that Heisman winner Jason White will return for a sixth season after receiving a medical redshirt, one has to feel sorry for sophomore Paul Thompson. Thompson, a staple of garbage time during the Sooners' regular-season routs, was the heir apparent at quarterback. His running style was to give OU's offense an interesting new dimension for 2004, not to mention a counterpunch for Texas' budding weapon, versatile QB Vince Young. Now, Thompson must return to the role of patient backup, and then worry about fending off Rhett Bomar, a blue-chip QB recruit from the Lone Star State, for the starting job in 2005.

Boise State players, in the process of stating their preference to play a bowl game somewhere other than Boise, took to calling the Humanitarian Bowl the H-Bowl. "We so much wanted to go somewhere besides the H-Bowl, and we got it," wide receiver and punt returner Tim Gilligan said. (The Broncs would go on to defeat TCU in the Fort Worth Bowl on Dec. 23.) Gilligan and BSU escaped the blue turf, but that means, as you read this, participants Georgia Tech and Tulsa have already begun practice, or "Preparation-H." Soothe that suffering, guys.

Here's where The Beat's readers have their say. This being the final column of the season, any mail you send won't make it onto the site (please, don't use that as an excuse to be vulgar ... or more vulgar than usual). But feel free to write -- I promise, I'll read it.

FEEDBACK MAILBAG Have questions or feedback? E-mail Luke Winn. Your name: Your e-mail address: Your home town: Enter your question:

The final topic: With bowl season right around the corner, tell a good story from a bowl trip, whether you mooned a crowd of unsuspecting Husker fans or never actually made it into to the stadium in Tempe. 

Here, a sample of the best replies: 

I and eight friends rented a mobile home and went to the 2000 Orange Bowl between Michigan and Alabama (we were all seniors at UMich). The game went into overtime and Alabama missed a tying extra point to give Michigan the win. Outside in the parking lot of the stadium, my friends and I re-enacted the missed extra point complete with a play-by-play announcer for a bunch of Alabama fans. I thought they were going to kill us. They started chasing us back to our RV and we luckily escaped.
 -- David Paton, Chelsea, Mich.

Last year, we went to the Continental Tire Bowl. We came down I-77 and had to listen to West Virginia fans the whole way down at rest areas, the hotel, and the restaurant for breakfast. The yakking continued in the parking lot before the game. After UVa. won the game 48-22, we were on the interstate heading home and a couple of unhappy WVU fans drove by and used a couple of unrepeatable words about UVa., so we caught up to them. My brother pulled his pants down and wrote 48 on one rear end cheek and 22 on the other. After that, we didn't hear anything else the rest of the trip.
 -- Andrew Ferguson, Fort Eustis, Va.

Jan. 1, 1989, Pasadena, shortly before the start of the Rose Bowl Parade. I and a group of fellow Wolverines were a bit late getting to the parade -- I think we'd stayed out later than most of the crowd. Anyway, we're trying to find a spot to camp out, and I'm not sure how, but we ended up walking down the middle of Colorado Ave. minutes before the parade was scheduled to start. As we are obviously Michigan students, we're drawing a lot of comments from the peanut gallery, both pro and con. In response, we start belting out The Victors. As luck would have it, we pass my parents as we are marching down the street, fists pumping, hands clapping, singing for all we're worth, with all the Michigan fans in attendance joining in. My parents told me later that it almost seemed like we were the opening act of the parade. I like to think that we not only led off the parade, but also set the tone for the day, which ended with a convincing victory over the Trojans.
 -- Tom Hanson, Ann Arbor, Mich.

In Tempe at last year's Fiesta Bowl, I got a call from a couple of Miami girls I had met the night before asking me to pick them up at a bar full of Hurricanes. Being a diehard Ohio State fan and student, I quickly put on my scarlet and gray and headed out the door. When I got there, I ventured into the place looking like a red dot in a sea of green. I saw the girls surrounded by Miami guys, went up to them, and after putting my arms around both of them, said, "Sorry, gentlemen, I'm taking your ladies!" As we walked out of the bar, debris flew in our direction. In the end, I got the girl, and the NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP.
 -- Joe Mount, Columbus, Ohio

The night before the Penn State-Alabama 1979 Sugar Bowl a ladder fire truck entered Bourbon Street on a false alarm. After they found no fire, there was a mob of people around the truck, so they had to stay until the crowd dispersed. My friend gave me an Alabama pennant and talked the fireman into letting me climb the ladder for a picture. I went up and my friend lit the pennant on fire as I was yelling, "Roll Tide, Roll around the hole and down the bowl." I was lucky only one 'Bama fan grabbed me and threw me down, and I ran away as fast as I could.

We didn't think PSU would lose, until we entered the Superdome and found a sea of red. (It's no wonder PSU couldn't score at the end -- they were going against 20,000 fans in the end zone.) Anyway, we had beautiful weather the whole trip until after the game, we came out of the Superdome and it was a monsoon. It rained so hard even the next day that we couldn't pack up our tent to put in the Winnebago, so we waited another day before starting home.

As I was driving the Winnebago at about 1 a.m. near Cullman, Ala., it broke down and we had to spend the night on the highway. Wouldn't you know, it was the first time it snowed there in like 10 years. As we were waiting at the garage for repairs, a reporter came because he heard the football team was broke down in town. It was only us students, so he interviewed us anyway, and we told him how Alabama deserved to be ranked No. 1 over USC. Later he mailed a half-page article with a picture to us. I still have it to this day. When I got back to PSU, I was two days late, had missed one midterm and was too sick to study for the other three coming up. I went from being so high to so low.
 -- Jeff Staul, Mercer, Pa.

As a 22-year-old one year removed from the University of Michigan, I went with my friends to the Rose Bowl after the 1997 season. They were all still students, taking a fifth year that had nothing to do with eligibility and everything to do with too much drinking. But that was enough to get them all tickets through the school -- and I didn't have one. After a frantic search leading up to the trip, I arrived in Pasadena still feeling like Charlie Bucket. I questioned just about every person I saw in town for the next 24 hours to no avail. Finally, about a half-hour before kickoff, I found someone selling tickets, and I talked the guy down quite a bit in price.

At last my search had paid off. I was completely geeked! That is, until another fan pointed out that my ticket was fake (as were both of his -- all three tickets were for the same seat). I only had 20 bucks left, so I knew I would just have to go for it (the ticket was an obvious fake when compared to a real one). I picked out the laziest security check man, and went to his gate. There were about 30 people trying to sit in my "assigned" seat, so I spent most of the first quarter bouncing around the WSU section, telling my sob story to the Cougar fans. I finally found an open one, and Michigan prevailed, securing a national championship. And the fake ticket turned out to be a pretty darn unique souvenir.
 -- Andrew, Chicago

After the 1975 Rose Bowl, my buddies and I returned to the car to go home. We parked on a side street that fed into a major road that took us over the hill into Glendale. The cars on the main road would not let the side street traffic turn left. I had taken a straw hat and whistle to the game.

So, I grabbed a flashlight from my friend's car and ran down to the intersection. I proceeded to direct traffic with my whistle and flashlight. I soon stopped the traffic from the main road, and let the side street traffic turn left. When my friend's car arrived, he stopped, opened the back door, and I hopped in! I can only imagine what the people in the cars along the main road thought when they saw me get in my friend's car and drive away!
 --  Curtis Reeves, Fresno, Calif.

Luke Winn is the college football producer for SI.com. The Beat appears each Wednesday on the site during the season, but sorry, this is the last one.