(06-29-2013 04:37 PM)omniorange Wrote: (06-25-2013 10:31 PM)quo vadis Wrote: (06-25-2013 10:08 PM)jaminandjachin Wrote: (06-25-2013 04:55 PM)mj4life Wrote: just about everything about the Orange Bowl is better. who cares if it's the 5th best SEC team as long as they bring fans that spend money & that's the bottom line.
This is the truth. The OB may have better match ups than both the Sugar and Rose Bowls most years.
For the first 25 years i watched college football, from the early 1970s to the late 1990s, the Orange Bowl probably had more great matchups than any of the other major bowls. It featured great games featuring blue-blood and on the rise programs like Oklahoma-Penn State, Notre Dame-Alabama, Miami-Nebraska, etc.
Sadly, during the BCS era the OB became the dumping-ground for undesirable Big East and ACC teams that were automatically included in the BCS even though they often did not deserve it.
This new deal, including the B1G, SEC, and ND, promises to rectify that.
You mean since the 5 game BCS era, right? Which occurred after the depletion of the Big East (with the Big East no longer a co-anchor of the bowl) and the fall of FSU and Miami.
Basically, yes. For the first part of the BCS era, the Orange Bowl did fine because even though the Big East champion often played in the national title game (e.g., VT in 1999, Miami in 2001 and 2002) it was able to fill the open slot with big-name teams from other BCS conferences (Michigan in 1999, Florida in 2001, USC in 2002). It also hosted the title game twice during that time (2000 and 2004), ensuring a strong matchup those years. The Orange only had to host a Big East champ twice between 1998-2004, once being the weak 1998 Syracuse team but in 2003 it was big-time Miami.
In the second part of the BCS era, from 2005 onwards, with the Big East stripped of Miami, the Orange Bowl prudently ended its Big East tie-in, which should have freed it from having to host lesser-name Big East participants. That era started off strongly with a classic matchup between FSU and Penn State.
Unfortunately for the Orange, thanks to the vagaries of the BCS selection process, it got saddled with the Big East champion three times in the next seven years, and these champs were small names. Even worse, the Orange also got clobbered by the softness of the ACC, its tie-in with that conference being an albatross featuring lousy and lesser-name VT, Clemson, GT, and Wake Forest teams. The combination of hosting soft ACC and Big East champs was devastating.
Over the last seven years, the only big-name team that the OB hosted was FSU this past year, and that game was itself greatly diminished because (a) the Orange also got saddled with Northern Illinois, the most ridiculous BCS bowl participant ever, and (b) FSU was coming off a bad home loss to SEC also-ran Florida, making their status as a "BCS conference champion" not very worthy of respect.
This new deal ensures that the Orange Bowl will surely have at least one big-name participant, from the B1G, SEC, or ND, even if the ACC continues to serve up bad football champions.