Should bowls avoid Penn State?

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The final regular season game did not go well for Penn State. Not at all. Not even a little bit.

If the Ohio State-Michigan clash was the Big Tens must-see game of last weekend, then the Penn State-Wisconsin meeting was the oppositea bludgeoning so brutal and one-sided (the Badgers won by 38) that it was better to look away. Things got so ugly in the end, I half expected the Nittany Lions and their fans to reenact a scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail and flee from Camp Randall Stadium while screaming run away, run away.

There will be no Big Ten Championship game for Penn State now. No Rose Bowl, either. Thats more bad news for the Nittany Lions. At a time when the on-going child sex abuse scandal has made some rethink their association with Penn State, Rose Bowl officials previously said they would welcome any team that qualified, including the Nittany Lions, with open arms.

You know who else is welcoming Penn State with open arms these days? Hold on while I checkstill lookingIm sure Ill find somethingwell, lets just stipulate that its a short list.

Until recently, it didnt occur to me that some postseason bowls might not want to bother with Penn State. The Nittany Lions are a powerhouse program with a legion of loyal fans that travel well. And while the idea of there being no such thing as bad publicity has been debunked many times over thanks to Jerry Sandusky, the people who organize bowl games are still very much in charge of bottom-line businesses. Creating matchups with teams that people want to watchor, failing that, a national story linewill potentially increase ratings and ad revenue. Its a fairly simple formula. Or at least it used to be.

After Rodney Erickson took over for Graham Spanier as the universitys president, he was asked whether Penn State might consider cancelling the remainder of its schedule. I thought that was a silly notion. Unless were all missing something, the current players didnt have anything to do with a cover-up, and I dont think they should be punished for crimes they didnt commit.

If our student athletes have earned the right to play in postseason play, they should certainly be allowed to do so, Erickson said.

Totally agree, though I wonder how many others do. Forget the Penn State loyalists. You know they want to see the Nittany Lions in a major bowl game. Or any bowl game. They hear Penn State football and salivate en masse like some horrible Pavlovian experiment gone wrong. The tougher sell, the big issue here, is the thought process for those who arent affiliated with the school. What do they think about Penn State and whether its worth the potential trouble to slot the Nittany Lions into a particular bowl game?

When recently questioned by Penn States student newspaper, the Daily Collegian, officials from the Fiesta, Outback and other bowls gave noncommittal answers about whether theyd consider the Nittany Lions. On ESPNs College Game Day over the weekend, panelist Desmond Howard did a lengthy monologue on why it would be unwise to for various bowls to select Penn State. And all sorts of media outlets have published pieces saying the bowls should stay away from Penn State andor that the Nittany Lions should decline any invitation. Even the Canadians think Penn State shouldnt play in the postseason, and they're usually too drunk on Labatt to care about anything that doesn't involve hockey.

Penn State was one win away from playing in the inaugural Big Ten Championship and finished 9-3 overall (6-2 in the absurdly, sadly named Leaders Division). From a football standpoint, theres no question they should appear in a quality bowl game. And yet you have to wonder how far the Nittany Lions might fall when all the Big Ten programs line up schoolyard kickball style and its time for the cool bowls to pick teams.

"Theres a process here for the Big Ten, and it might not serve the Nittany Lions welleven after Penn State officials recently promised to donate 1.5 million in bowl proceeds to sex-crime advocacy groups, according to the Associated Press." Thats obviously out for Penn State. After that, the bowl order goes Capital One, Outback, Insight, Gator, Meineke Car Care, Ticket City and Little Caesars bowls. When more than eight teams become bowl eligible with at least six wins, each bowl has the right to give Penn State or any other school the stiff arm. And guess what? The Big Ten, thanks to some bizarre act of benevolence by the ever-fickle Football Gods, has 10 teams with 6-6 records or better.

That doesnt mean the Nittany Lions will be shunned or that theyll end up playing a Peruvian semi-pro team in the SomeGuy.com Bowl. It simply means nothing is assured for Penn State. Not this year. Maybe not ever again.

Youve got to give them credit for everything thats gone on, interim Penn State head coach Tom Bradley said after the Nittany Lions lost to Wisconsin. Theyve hung tough. Theyve done a great job sticking together, and Im proud of them. Im proud of the way they behaved. Im proud of the way they acted. My hats off to them in a situation thats unprecedented in college football. They didnt have anything to do with it. They werent involved in it in any way. And I think they deserve an opportunity to play a bowl game.

The man speaks truth. I wonder whether the bowl officials are listening.
E-mail John Gonzalez at jgonzalez@comcastsportsnet.com

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