ANN ARBOR—The Big Ten has sacrificed a great football tradition for a chance at an unprovable national championship, says a Harvard University lecturer in the forthcoming issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review, published by the University of Michigan.

The Rose Bowl, college football’s oldest bowl game, dates to a 1902 contest between U-M and Stanford University. (Michigan won 49-0.) The 1947 Rose Bowl was the first played under an exclusive agreement the game’s sponsor, the Tournament of Roses, had signed the previous year committing the champions of the Big Ten and the Pacific Coast Conference (predecessor of the Pac-10) to meet each year. The non-profit Tournament of Roses has kept the Rose Bowl the only such contest not named after a commercial sponsor.

In his essay, “The Myth of The Best,” Louis M. Guenin, points out that after this year’s game between U-M and Washington State University, the Rose Bowl will join the “bowl alliance” of such conferences as the Big East, Big 12, and now the Big Ten. Alliance members “have agreed to send to a ‘national championship game’ any of their teams that at the end of any season rank first or second in a specified opinion poll.” The game will rotate between four different sites, including the Rose Bowl.

The most obvious result is that future Big Ten and Pac-10 champions will not be invited to play in the Rose Bowl if the specified opinion poll ranks either champion as first or second nationally, unless it is the Rose Bowl’s turn to host the championship game.

The supposed benefit of this change, says Guenin, is that a definitive national champion will at last be known. He shows mathematically, however, that this is “an exercise in futility.” The large number of NCAA teams and the necessarily short regular season require national ranking to be based only on highly subjective opinion polls. Therefore, the national championship game will be played by teams that have not really proven themselves the best.

The first “national championship game” played under this subjective and “inconsistent” selection process was the 1996 Tostitos Fiesta Bowl between Florida and Nebraska. The final score of 62-24 was “one of the most lopsided post-season games in recent memory,” Guenin says. “It is much more plausible to believe that the polls erred, that there were teams superior to Florida at the time, than to imagine that none could compete against Nebraska.”

The losses, says Guenin, will heavily outweigh benefits. The Rose Bowl is a tradition that emphasizes the entire university, not just its football team. “The morning Rose Parade celebrates creativity, enthusiasm and floral beauty; the afternoon game celebrates competition in many endeavors between two distinguished collections of research institutions.”

Under the new system, the Rose Bowl will lose the appearance of representing more than money, says Guenin, and college football will gain only the facade of a national champion. In truth, this attempt to define which team is the best in the country “is the pursuit of a will-o’-the-wisp.”

Guenin is available for comment by e-mail at [email protected]

U-M News and Information Services University of Michigan

[email protected]U-M News and Information ServicesUniversity of Michigan