Bowled Over, Bowled Out

11:48 a.m.
Just a thought. Can you imagine if Dr. Punch was your actual doctor? Uh, Dr. Punch, maybe die stethoscope would work better if you took off the headset.

12:21 p.m.
Best line of the day: After Penn State's O.J. McDuffie drops an easy pass in the Blockbuster Bowl, CBS's Jim Nantz says, "Maybe it was the glare off of all the empty seats."

It's possible. Joe Robbie Stadium features 27,446 empty seats. Of course, that's what the Blockbuster Bowl gets for signing up Penn State for this game last May. Penn State ended up this season 7-4. Then it gets thrown in against the Genius, Bill Walsh, and Stanford. You know what we say? Good.

1:40 p.m.
If I get one more minute of massage I may turn Swedish.

1:58 p.m.
I think I just slept through the Citrus Bowl. Right now, it's my favorite.

2:17 p.m.
Hannah Storm of NBC is having a bad hair day. Still, she's the best sideline announcer so far. She proved it by asking Notre Dame coach Lou Holtz if his team's 28-3 win over Texas A&M in the Cotton Bowl was the best revenge against those who said the Irish should never have been invited in the first place. Damn right, Holtz said, in so many words.

2:31 p.m.
Stat of the day: Since 1988 no team currently in the Southwest Conference has scored a touchdown in the Cotton Bowl.

2:45 p.m.
All praises to the Genius. He helped Stanford stomp Penn State 24-3. After the loss, the Nittany Lions immediately accepted a bid to the 1995 Peach Bowl.

2:50 p.m.
Oops! Almost forgot to tune in to the infamous Fiesta Bowl in Tempe, Ariz. At last year's Fiesta there were protests over Arizona's lack of a holiday for Martin Luther King. This year there were protests over the presence of Colorado coach Bill McCartney, who's a leader of Colorado for Family Values, which helped push through Amendment 2, which, some people say, made it legal to discriminate against gays in Colorado. McCartney didn't back down and never does. So far in his career he has been legally stopped from leading pregame prayers for his team, spoken at an Operation Rescue antiabortion rally two nights before a game against Oklahoma State and been accused of having Bibles printed up with the Colorado football logo. Now he and his school are a target in the national boycott against Colorado, a place some people call the Hate State. On the plus side, they say his halftime speeches are terrific in the original German.

2:59 p.m.
The Fiesta should just close down and start over. The field at Arizona State's Sun Devil Stadium is in such horrible condition that it has been reduced to painted sand. Terrific for the University of Iraq, but Syracuse and Colorado look lost on it. To top if off, the game's new sponsor, IBM, insists on calling it the IBM OS/2 Fiesta Bowl. Sounds more like an invoice.