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Alexander: Rose Bowl capitulates to College Football Playoff demands

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LAS VEGAS — In the end, the Rose Bowl said “uncle.”

The people who oversee the Tournament of Roses and its football spectacle eventually came to the realization that the traditions that make New Year’s Day in Pasadena so special – including, but not limited to, that wonderfully picturesque sunset that always greets the end of the third quarter in the Arroyo Seco – are meaningless to College Football Nation.

Specifically, those traditions are meaningless to the TV executives who now wield so much power in the sport, and who undoubtedly will be calling most of the shots as the College Football Playoff expands to 12 teams, beginning with the 2024 season.

It came down to either hopping on the train or being left behind. The Rose Bowl capitulated this week, meeting a Wednesday deadline to agree that it would join the CFP rotation on the CFP’s terms and would forego a guarantee that Ol’ Granddad would have its 2 p.m. kickoff time, um, grandfathered in.

The CFP had leverage, and it used it. That’s fair, and understandable. But we don’t have to like it.

We know that the Rose Bowl will start at its traditional time this coming Jan. 2 – the Monday after New Year’s Day since one of the tenets of Pasadena’s game, and the parade that precedes it, is never on Sunday – and that the parade and game will also take their traditional place on Jan. 1, 2024, the last year of the four-team playoff.

After that? It’s anyone’s guess. Depending on where it falls in the rotation as a quarterfinal or a semifinal, the Rose Bowl could be played on Dec. 31, or a week after New Year’s Day. It could be a day game, or a night game, or whatever slot the executives of the rights-holder decide would pull in the bigger ratings numbers.

But not Sunday. Not head-to-head with the NFL. College Football Inc. might be rapacious but it’s not stupid.

I suppose the agreement between the Rose Bowl and the CFP could be considered a sunset provision. (And while I can’t guarantee that will be the last of the bad puns in this column, I’ll try to keep things under control.)

Laura Farber, the chairman of the Rose Bowl Management Committee, confirmed in an interview with SCNG’s James Williams on Thursday that the Pasadena people had sought to maintain their exclusive window at 2 p.m. New Year’s Day, but gave up that negotiating position in exchange for assurances that the CFP board of managers would work with them. “(It’s) our intent to keep the Rose Bowl on Jan. 1, but we will remain flexible as needed,” she said.

At least we can assume that the game will be played in Pasadena, as it should be, barring another public health crisis. The decision to move the playoff semifinal from Pasadena to Arlington, Texas, two years ago due to California’s no-spectators policy in the midst of COVID-19 is still an irritant in This Space, two years after the fact.

They used the rose logo, but it wasn’t the Rose Bowl. It was the Jerry Bowl. Did Pasadena ever receive adequate compensation for being shunted aside? I doubt it.

Bottom line: To people in Pac-12 country and people in Big Ten country – and those of us in SoCal who are about to transition from one to the other – the Rose Bowl and its tradition have mattered. Even when the parameters changed, and Pac-12 and/or Big Ten champions instead played in BCS or CFP championship games and other conferences began sending representatives to Pasadena, the Rose Bowl still had a hallowed place because of that 2 p.m. kickoff, which meant 5 p.m. in the East, which meant that snowbound folks in the rest of the country got to marvel at those third-quarter sunsets.

As you might have noticed, lots of them have moved out here.

Yet the main emotion in the rest of College Football Nation is incredulity that the Rose Bowl has maintained that status even as its matchups have been cannibalized. In the more recent past, the Big Ten champion has been a playoff participant. The Pac-12 champion? Pasadena as a consolation prize, since in most years it hasn’t come close to the top four.

Typical of the feeling in other parts of the country was this from Yahoo! Sports’ Jay Busbee following the Rose Bowl/CFP agreement: “One by one, college football’s old ways are fading into history. Good riddance. … Sometimes, what starts out as fond tradition curdles into why-is-this-still-here custom. Case in point: the Rose Bowl. The Granddaddy of Them All has spent most of the past century as the centerpiece of college football’s marquee day: New Year’s Day, specifically the timeslot that allows the sun to set on the San Gabriel Mountains at the end of the third quarter. It’s beautiful, it’s magnificent, it’s inspiring … and it’s been a stubborn, infuriating roadblock to playoff expansion for years.”

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And, he added: “Not coincidentally, this will earn the NCAA an additional half billion in revenue; sunsets are nice, but cash is better.”

Of course. This is one college football tradition that never gets old, right? Grab the cash, Cede your sport to television executives and shoe companies and the like. And when it comes to the division of that TV money – which could be more than $2 billion in the next contract, to start with the 2026 season – you know none of it will go directly to the people putting their bodies on the line on the field. NIL money, and deals via booster collectives, likely don’t account for playoff shares.

If you’re going to attack tradition, then start there. Scrap those last vestiges of amateurism and give the members of those 12 finalists direct playoff shares, rather than handing out bowl game tote bags and Xboxes and considering that adequate compensation.

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