Texas to play in Alamo Bowl / Rutgers in Texas Bowl

Texas Bowl News. Rutgers fans should have the right to see their game.

Washington Post

Bowl Games Could Help NFL Network

By Les Carpenter and Thomas Heath
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, December 9, 2006; Page E07

When the NFL Network won its bids on a pair of college bowl games this year, it realized it was getting more than just a foothold on another level of football. It also would find itself fighting on another tier with the cable companies that are refusing to carry the three-year-old channel on their systems.

When the pairings for those two bowl games were announced this week, the league, already challenging the cable providers to a fight over NFL games, discovered just how much additional leverage it had. The Texas Bowl on Dec. 28 will pit Rutgers against Kansas State, and the next day's Insight Bowl will feature Texas Tech against Minnesota. All are located in or near markets affected by three of the biggest cable holdouts: Time Warner, Cablevision and Charter Communications.

Nowhere is the level of consternation higher than in New Jersey, where Rutgers is in the midst of its best season in three decades. Roughly 1.7 million of the state's 2.5 million cable subscribers viewers have either Cablevision, Time Warner or a non-digital level of Comcast service that does not allow them to get the NFL Network.

"Going to the game is the way to guarantee seeing it live," said Rutgers deputy athletic director Kevin MacConnell. "We are working on it with the Big East. Obviously, considering we are in the biggest media market in the country and our TV ratings have been great, to have it over the air would be a win-win for everybody."

This week, Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) sent a letter to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and NFL Network President Steve Bornstein asking the league to put the Rutgers-Kansas State game on a free television station in the New York-New Jersey market.

"It's unacceptable that a majority of New Jerseyans may not be able to watch their state university play in a bowl game," Lautenberg said in a statement issued yesterday afternoon. "This is a dispute between the NFL and the cable companies and Rutgers fans shouldn't be used as leverage. If the NFL and the cable companies want to fight, let them. But that shouldn't stop the NFL from letting this game be shown on local broadcast television in New Jersey."

NFL rules require the NFL Network to put the eight professional games it carries this year up for bid to free stations in the markets of the competing teams. Such a provision does not exist for college games.

A league executive not authorized to speak publicly on the subject said the NFL is unable to offer the college telecasts to local stations because doing so would destroy the system of television rights fees which help guarantee payouts to competing schools.

The cable companies allege the NFL has driven the price of its network higher than they are willing to pay for a station to run on its regular service; the companies have offered to put the network on a more expensive sports tier. The NFL contends the sports tier will keep its network from reaching a mainstream audience. The staredown will probably continue until the courts can settle a dispute between the NFL and Comcast, which are arguing over whether their deal allows the NFL Network to be moved to a sports tier.

Already the NFL has had to explain its dispute with the cable companies before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which was looking into whether sports antitrust laws need to be reexamined.

 

Alamo Bowl Story

Football: Twenty-two years later, Texas has chance to make up for miserable bowl loss to Iowa

Web Posted: 12/06/2006 10:46 PM CST

Jeff McDonald
Express-News

As a high school psychology teacher, Chris Duliban knows a thing or two about repressed memories and how they can be unlocked by the most random of cues.
"Then, it's like a filing cabinet," he said. "It opens the door, and out comes the papers."


As a former Texas linebacker, Duliban should have experienced one of those filing-cabinet moments earlier this week, when he cracked his morning newspaper to discover that his alma mater had been paired with Iowa in this year's Alamo Bowl.

Duliban was a junior the only other time the Longhorns faced the Hawkeyes, in the 1984 Freedom Bowl. Iowa's 55-17 victory rates as one of the most embarrassing postseason pratfalls in UT history.

News of the rematch, set for Dec. 30 at the Alamodome, should have triggered in Duliban a whole bureau-full of unpleasant recollections. Visions of Iowa quarterback Chuck Long throwing each of his six touchdown passes should have danced in his head.

But some memories, Duliban says, are meant to stay repressed.

"Chuck Long might have stepped on my throat once after throwing a touchdown," said Duliban, now a teacher at Hyde Park Baptist in Austin. "I'm not going to remember it."

For most everyone else involved, from Austin to Iowa City, the night after Christmas of 1984 remains one that will not soon be forgotten.

With the past soon poised to repeat itself, images of that dreary evening at the Freedom Bowl have sprung forth from the memory banks of Longhorns and Hawkeyes everywhere.

Long, who threw for 461 yards that day to go with his six-pack of TDs, remembers it as the game that put Iowa on the national map. Jonathan Hayes, the Iowa tight end on the receiving end of two of Long's scorings tosses, remembers it as a triumph of David over Goliath, of media afterthought over media darling.

Jerry Gray, the famed Longhorns free safety, remembers it simply as "the day we got Chuck Long drafted."

History remembers it as the beginning of the end for embattled UT coach Fred Akers, who was fired two seasons later.

Duliban remembers little, except not really wanting to be there in the first place.

Similar to this year


The Longhorns had been ranked No. 1 in the nation earlier that season before falling apart in November, losing three of their last four to land in a relatively obscure bowl game in Anaheim, Calif.
UT players voted by the slimmest of margins — Duliban recalls a 51-49 tally — to even accept an invitation to the Freedom Bowl's inaugural game.

"There was a lot of disappointment we weren't playing in a game with national championship written all over it," said Gray, now a position coach with the Washington Redskins.

The result was a lethargic, careless performance and one of the most lopsided bowl defeats in UT football annals.

Members of this year's UT team, who share a painfully common kinship with their underachieving 1984 brethren, would do well to heed the history lesson. The similarities between the two teams, separated by 22 years, are startling.

This year's team, like the 1984 vintage, was ranked in the top five before also coming unglued in November, dropping to No. 18 and alighting at a less-than-prestigious bowl destination.

"If I could give these guys advice, it would be, 'Don't go in halfhearted,'" Gray said. "You've got to have a killer instinct no matter who you are playing."

Gray and the rest of the 1984 team learned that lesson the hard way.

The '84 Longhorns viewed the trip to California as little more than a Christmas vacation. They spent a few hours a day practicing and watching film.

"The rest of the time, you're going to see Farrah Fawcett's house or where Larry Hagman lives," Duliban said.

Taking a signal from their coach, a dyed-in-the-wool Texan named Hayden Fry, Iowa players treated the bowl excursion like a business trip.

The task at hand was to prove that the Hawkeyes deserved to share the same stage as the formerly top-ranked team from Texas.

"The way the media was talking, there was no way we had a chance," Hayes said. "Coach Fry played that up to us in a big way."

Undone by one quarter


Dec. 26, 1984, was gray and rainy in southern California, mirroring the Longhorns' mood.
Warming up before the game, even Long found himself fretting about the weather.

"I kept throwing duck after duck," said Long, now the coach at San Diego State. "Then the game started, and everything clicked."

Iowa took a 24-17 lead into the half, then exploded for 31 unanswered points in the third quarter. That outburst included four TD tosses by Long, who the next year was a first-round draft pick by the Detroit Lions.

"One play led to another, led to another," said Hayes, who now coaches the Cincinnati Bengals' tight ends. "Sometimes, you just get that feeling and ride the wave. That's what we did that day."

The Longhorns, meanwhile, were buried beneath a tidal wave of humiliation that, to some of them, still suffocates. Bad memories from that night have been dredged up, like muck from the bottom of a lake, by the impending Alamo Bowl rematch.

More than two decades later, Duliban can think of but one way to purge from his palate the distaste lingering from the Freedom Bowl fiasco. He can think of one good way to lock that filing cabinet forever.

A bona fide rematch, between a bunch of 40-something men, playing out old grudges on old knees for old time's sake.

"We'll get the '84 team together right now, and we'll get the Iowa team, Long and all them, and strap it on one more time," Duliban said. "We could play at halftime at the Alamo Bowl. I guarantee we'll beat them."