LV Bowl deserves team that covets trip

Running a college football bowl game is a lot like running your life. There are priorities to consider, factors that outweigh others, specific issues of importance that must be met first.

Attendance is usually near the top of that list for bowls. On this, the Las Vegas Bowl again has wholly succeeded, having announced a sellout of its Dec. 22 game at Sam Boyd Stadium more than two months before kickoff.

But slightly trailing the number of bottoms in seats on the significance gauge is how competitive and compelling a game you offer fans. On this, committee members here are annually like most not associated with those five games from the Bowl Championship Series cartel: cautiously anxious.

Brigham Young defeated Oregon in last year's Las Vegas Bowl 38-8. It just seemed like 108-8. It wasn't over in the first quarter or at halftime. It was over the second Oregon lost its third straight to end the regular season and began considering all the places it didn't want to be over the holidays.

"In all fairness to Oregon, their coaches and athletic director and everyone else with them came to myself and our committee members and said how happy they were to be here," said Tina Kunzer-Murphy, executive director of the Las Vegas Bowl. "They had been calling us to say if they couldn't go to the BCS national championship or Rose Bowl, this is where they wanted to be."

Bowl directors can be some of the more eccentric sorts you will meet. They walk around wearing plastic smiles and some of the most hideous looking jackets ever stitched. This is what makes Kunzer-Murphy different. She's real, intelligent, sensible, passionate about her bowl -- and yet not in a way you're always looking behind her to find men in white coats holding nets.

But know this: Oregon wanted to be here last year like I want to be shocked repeatedly in the face with a stun gun. It had nothing to do with the Las Vegas Bowl or how well it is annually run and everything to do with the Ducks being upset they couldn't play well enough to earn a more high-profile bowl. Too bad. Play better.

Oregon lost its way into the game, the last thing any non-BCS bowl official desires.

Oregon State is today the leading Pac-10 option for this year's Las Vegas Bowl (which will have the fifth selection from the league) out of a wild and unpredictable conference race.

The Beavers are 5-3 and have a difficult enough remaining schedule (at Southern California, vs. Washington, at Washington State, at Oregon) to demand they win their way into any bowl. They would be ecstatic to be here, interested, prepared -- everything that Oregon wasn't.

California is a bigger name right now, but how thrilled do you think a team that came within a few minutes of being ranked No. 1 would be to play here? USC is a monster name, but ask yourself the same question times 10.

Whichever team lands on the Pac-10 side of the matchup probably will play BYU, which is 3-0 in the Mountain West Conference and seemingly last lost a league game when LaVell Edwards had hair.

Kunzer-Murphy actually has been receiving e-mails from some deranged BYU fans who are upset by rumors the bowl won't select the Cougars a third straight year even if they are again conference champions.

Memo to those unstable ones: BYU sells tickets like Bayer does aspirin, and its fans certainly would snatch up any not used by an opposing team. The only team that would come close to being a better Mountain West fit than the Cougars is UNLV and, well, I could easily lose track with the thousands of one-liners available about the Rebels ever winning a conference title.

You can be assured BYU will be invited if it wins the league and maybe if it doesn't, because the selection committee does not comprise buffoons. Let's just hope whoever the Cougars play doesn't think of December in Las Vegas as one might imprisonment.

Kunzer-Murphy and her staff have done too fine a job raising the level of their game to worry if one of the participants would rather be playing video games at home than football here. That was the case last year with Oregon, which made a really intriguing matchup on paper turn into a really awful game.

"The worst-case scenario you can have is a team coming in that has been on a downward spiral," Kunzer-Murphy said. "Sometimes, you can't control that given where you select and where teams are slotted in their league. But we'd always prefer a team that has to win to get to our bowl."

See. Intelligent. Sensible. Rarely, if ever, seen in a hideous jacket.

Give her BYU-Oregon State and she'll really have it going on.

Ed Graney's column is published Sunday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday. He can be reached at 383-4618 or egraney@reviewjoural.com.