VOTE - Who would have won the 1994 CFP?

[ELA]

Out of curiosity is the Rose still like a holiday event for your family?  Was Oklahoma-Georgia viewed the same way as the traditional Pac 10/Big 10 matchup?

Well, my family is now dispersed, and so we get together at CHristmas, and are not together on NYD anymore, but we have my wife's family over to our house for the game.  They aren't college football folks, being Pittsburghers, but my brother in law is a Penn State fan, and a few years younger than me.  He's still all in on the Rose Bowl, not sure if he cares if it's Big 10/Pac 12 or not though.

[Entropy]

My .02:

When I was growing up the Rose Bowl was an afterthought, and I was a rabid consumer of college football. I used to buy up every one of those those preseason mags and read and re-read them, memorizing the best players, coaches and teams. I still have many of those mags.

Don’t get me wrong; the Rose was interesting when there were matchups between highly-rated Helmet Schools. That didn’t happen on a regular basis though. What I was seeing happen on a regular basis were the top-ranked schools from the other conferences squaring off against one another in the other NYD bowls. That was far more interesting, to me.

Just based on the anecdotal evidence from convos I was seeing online at CNN/SI and email listservs such, fans from the rest of the country felt the same and were ready to move on into some type of pre-playoff structure without the Big Ten after 1997. That controversy served to wake the BIG, fortunately.

this....  outside the BIG, we mocked the conference.  They hid.  Slow..  avoid the best teams.    Right or Wrong, that was the perception growing up.  

[FearlessF]

hey, we mocked the PAC too

[847badgerfan]

Really hope you're not mocking the Big Ten anymore.

[FearlessF]

not as far as you know....

https://y.yarn.co/d3d4c5a9-2734-4b17-8cd5-4dc9d4bfc1bd.mp4?1548443968166

[SFBadger96]

The old bowl system was much more regional and tribal than it is now. If you were in Big Ten or Pac-10 territory, the Rose Bowl was the end-all-be-all. For more than fifty years, the winners of the Big Ten and the Pac-10 met in the Rose Bowl, so the pinnacle of those conferences was Pasadena. Full stop. Particularly given the way the MNCs were decided, the other bowls--and as a result the other conferences--really didn't matter as much. And of course fans of teams not from those two conferences probably didn't much care about the Rose Bowl, other than its nice time slot. None of their teams would ever play there.

I grew up in the Pac and went the Big Ten for college and the Rose Bowl was what we cared about. I watched the end of the 1987 Fiesta Bowl--I remember Penn State batting down Miami's desperate last attempt, but that's the only bowl game I remember that wasn't the Rose Bowl. I'm sure we watched some of the other bowls from time to time, but they just weren't that important because that's not where our teams played.

Particularly at a time when independent teams were large on the landscape and the Orange, Cotton, and Sugar had at most one automatic tie in, so Miami, Penn State, Florida State, and Notre Dame would play the top teams from the SWC, the SEC, the Big-8 or the Big East in the Cotton, the Sugar, and the Orange, and then the Fiesta, too. Frankly, the rest of the college football landscape had every reason to dismiss the Big Ten and Pac-10 and the inverse was true, too.

[847badgerfan]

On top of all of that, SF, is the fact that until 1975, the Rose Bowl was the ONLY bowl for the Big Ten.

[FearlessF]

that was a silly rule

[847badgerfan]

That's what the faculty wanted. The official name of the conference, until 1987, was the Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives, founded in 1896. It had other nicknames along the way - Western, Big 9, Big 10, Big Ten - but Big Ten was not officially adopted until 1987.

[FearlessF]

silly faculty

[847badgerfan]

silly faculty

Yeah, enough with this Kollege nonsense, eh?

[FearlessF]

That's what the faculty wanted. The official name of the conference, until 1987, was the Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives, founded in 1896. It had other nicknames along the way - Western, Big 9, Big 10, Big Ten - but Big Ten was not officially adopted until 1987.

and Michigan talked the Commish into allowing them to play in the Orange Bowl after the 74 season?

[medinabuckeye1]

that was a silly rule

It sounds silly in today's environment but it helped to build up interest in the RoseBowl because that was it.  The football fans in the two conferences' footprints pretty much all watched the RB and that helped build it into what it became.  

[847badgerfan]

and Michigan talked the Commish into allowing them to play in the Orange Bowl after the 74 season?

They petitioned the faculty reps, is how I understand it. Then they changed the rule a year or two later. I don't have direct recall on it. I was 7.