Wednesday, Dec. 08, 2010

Morris: Bowl game is of great importance

STEVE SPURRIER HAS told the story often. His Florida football team was dismantled 62-24 by Nebraska in the Fiesta Bowl for the 1995 national championship. As a result, Spurrier said Florida fans quickly forgot the team’s 11-0 regular season and SEC championship.

Ever since, Spurrier has said a team is remembered most by its last game. He said it after USC was humiliated by Iowa in the Outback Bowl two seasons ago and again last season after the Gamecocks were embarrassed by Connecticut in the Papajohns.com Bowl.

It is why USC’s upcoming Chick-fil-A Bowl game against Florida State is critically important to Spurrier’s program and the USC athletics department.

A loss in Atlanta will chisel away much of the luster from an otherwise very good — not “super,” as Spurrier says — season. Beyond that, a loss would produce a huge hit to 2011 season-ticket sales.

Mostly what a loss in the Chick-fil-A Bowl would do is give USC the same sorry ending to a season it has experienced year after year for most of the past century or so. The national perception of USC’s season will not be pretty if the Gamecocks lose and finish with a 9-5 record.

Fair or not, the take on USC will be that it is just another five-loss team that won a division rightfully known as the SEC Least this season. The national media also will point out that USC’s lone quality win was against an Alabama team ranked No. 1 at the time but nowhere near that by the end of the season.

For USC fans, it will be another offseason of wondering what the heck went wrong at the end. They will begin to question how a team that dominated Florida to win a division title gets destroyed by Auburn in the SEC Championship Game then loses a bowl game to — gasp! — an ACC opponent.

When USC fell to Connecticut a year ago, it might have been the best thing to happen to the program. It gave Spurrier and the team a rallying cry for the this offseason. It showed USC how much work needed to be done during the offseason to become an outstanding team.

A loss in this bowl game will not have the same effect. First of all, USC was happy to drop down the SEC bowl pecking order to get an opponent in the Chick-fil-A Bowl it should defeat. So a loss to Florida State would be a blow to USC. It would be a major step backward for a program that has taken a few big steps forward this season.

Unfortunately, history makes us question whether Spurrier adequately can prepare his team for the Chick-fil-A Bowl. USC has lost three of four bowl games under Spurrier, and in the win, the Gamecocks had to hang on against a Conference USA opponent.

Perhaps Spurrier should consult with former USC coach Lou Holtz about bowl-game preparation. Holtz did not believe, like most coaches, that a bowl game was a reward for an outstanding season. Instead, he made life miserable for his players and coaching staff during the month leading up to a bowl game as a way of showing there was business at hand.

USC must take the same approach to the Chick-fil-A Bowl. It is far too important to be treated any other way. A 10-win season (even though it took a school-record 14 games) is at stake. A bowl win would propel USC into next season as the favorite to repeat as champion of the SEC East and possibly to a top-10 preseason ranking.

For the athletics department, it would be a much-needed shot in the arm after sharp drop-offs in season-ticket sales the past two seasons. The economy, seat licensing and increased Gamecock Club dues were the causes. The result was USC fans filled Williams-Brice Stadium for one (Alabama) of seven home games in 2010.

The USC ticket office could use momentum going into next season, because the home schedule is not overly appealing; Navy, Vanderbilt, Auburn (without Cam Newton), Kentucky, Florida and Clemson will visit Columbia.

It all adds up to a Chick-fil-A Bowl of great importance to USC.

Following Auburn’s rout of USC in the SEC Championship Game, most Gamecocks players talked about how the outcome took much away from the success they achieved during the regular season.

“Right now it does,” quarterback Stephen Garcia said. “This is very hard to swallow. It’s very frustrating, what happened today.”

Ellis Johnson, USC’s assistant coach in charge of defense, summed it up well.

“Getting here maybe gives us a chance to maybe get more guys to come here, knowing we can do it,” Johnson said. “But the performance tonight leaves us in a situation where we’ve got to do better next time we go out.”

That next time is Dec. 31 in Atlanta in the Chick-fil-A Bowl, a game USC can ill afford to lose.

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