Bowl Games: College Football's Greatest Tradition

Rating:
Summary: A terrific football book
Review: This book is an excellent history of how college football was transformed by bowl games. Most fans take these games for granted, but for many years there was only the Rose Bowl. Because that game featured teams from different parts of the country, the Rose Bowl slowly became the focus of deciding the best team in the nation. In the 1930s, the Cotton and Sugar were added, and from there, postseason games took off, until their results were not only used to determine the national champion, they forced the AP poll to take its final poll after these games once a few "national champions" got clobbered in bowls! Throughout, there are great anecdotes and photos. The appendices are very useful as well. It is amazing to read about Bobby Layne's 40-point performance in the Cotton Bowl, running, throwing, kicking, and catching. I found the book to be quite enjoyable.
As a final note, I agree whole-heartedly with the author that it is a shame that New Year's Day is no longer the special bowl game day it once was. It was a wonderful tradition for decades, but that has gone by the wayside with the BCS format. Oh well. By the way, readers, I have no idea what book that Publishers Weekly reviewer was looking at! Must not have been a football fan is all I can tell.


Rating:
Summary: Excellent reference, but narrative bogs down
Review: This is a good reference book that traces the history of bowl games over the last 100 years, but I was hoping for more than it delivered.

As a reference book, this book is excellent. Every bowl game certified by the NCAA is listed, and Ours also provides a good deal of interesting information about bowl games not easily available in one place. Ours discusses the origins of every long-established bowl game, with particular emphasis on the Rose Bowl's origins and early years. He then narrates, year-by-year, the results of each bowl as he traces the history and development of "college football's greatest tradition". By telling the bowl story he also traces some of the story of college football as a whole. We learn of the bowls' origins and how the Depression, World War II, and the civil rights struggle affected the bowls. In the early years Ours also gives more than passing attention to especially notable games and teams. Also, Ours touches on the existence of numerous little-known, short-lived games.

Unfortunately, about halfway through the book, the narrative's flow changes. What begins as a flowing description of the bowl and college football atmosphere turns into a plodding, dry recitation of scores and statistics. Ours clearly wants to give at least some text to nearly every bowl, a worthy but increasingly tedious goal as the bowls proliferate. The lack of sidebars spotlighting especially great games and performances leaves a narrative that drowns out the human element with a monotonous recitation of scores, rankings, yards gained, etc.

By the late 1980s, most of the bowls had title sponsors, and Ours annoys by always using the bowls' full corporate names. Evidently Ours, a bowl traditionalist, wants to emphasize just how irritating and tacky this practice is without overtly editorializing.

The narrative gets better when he reaches the Bowl Coalition/Alliance/BCS period. Once again, Ours is talking about an issue affecting the bowls rather than just reciting the results. In an epilogue, Ours talks about the bowl system's changes in recent years and opines that the plethora of bowls, the various bowl coalitions, and the January 4 finale to the bowl season has diluted the special magical aura that surrounded the bowls in past decades. (He remembers as far back as New Year's Day 1947!)

The book was finished in the summer of 2004, so it ends with the 2003 BCS fiasco and the reforms for 2004.

I appreciate the year-by-year summaries of the bowl games, but I was hoping for more discussion. Some issues I was hoping to see addressed include:

* The NCAA and bowl games: How does a game get certified or decertified? Ours opines that there are too many bowls today. Does the NCAA have the ability or desire to do something about this?

* The Fiesta Bowl: How did this rather new bowl rise from minor status to surpass many older bowls and ultimately displace the Cotton Bowl as a premier bowl game?

* The Sun Bowl: Why did this bowl, begun at the same time as the Orange, Sugar, and Cotton bowls, never gain the prestige of the others?

* The polls and bowl games: Bowl games did not count in the AP poll until the 1960s, nor in the UPI poll until the 1970s. Was this change controversial?

I also would have appreciated some more treatment of the greatest and most important games and individual performances through the years. A chapter devoting one or two pages each to bowls like the 1963 Rose, 1979 Cotton and Sugar, 1984 Orange, and 2003 Fiesta would have greatly added to the book's strength. A subjective list of the 10 greatest games, coaches, and individual performances in bowl games would make for some nice juicy arguments.

There is an appendix listing every bowl game in chronological order with the participants' win-loss records. The defunct games are included, something omitted from many references. National champions participating in bowls are shown in bold face. Some overall bowl game records are also listed. Surprisingly, there is no list of annual national champions. Also, since the narrative often refers to Lambert Trophy-winning teams, a list of these would seem to be called for.

If you want a useful reference book about the bowls, this is a good choice. If you want the definitive book on bowls, this is not it. Perhaps that book hasn't been written yet.

I am pleased with what the book does offer, I am glad I own it, and I learned things about bowl history that I didn't know - but "Bowl Games: College Football's Greatest Tradition" could have been much more than it is.