Sorry Lambright, Ducks And Buffs Get Cotton Bowl Committee Also Bypasses A Southwest Conference Team
The Cotton Bowl made it official on Sunday. It extended invitations to No. 8 Colorado and No. 12 Oregon for its Jan. 1 game.
It’s the first Cotton Bowl since 1940 without a Southwest Conference team. And it will pit two first-year head coaches with 9-2 records against each other - Colorado’s Rick Neuheisel and Oregon’s Mike Bellotti.
The Cotton Bowl bypassed Pacific-10 Conference co-champion Washington (with Southern California) for the Ducks, who beat the 20th-ranked Huskies earlier this season. UW coach Jim Lambright had lobbied hard for his Huskies to get a bid to the Cotton Bowl.
Sunday, Cotton Bowl executives refused to question their late-week decision to invite Oregon (9-2) conditionally if it beat Oregon State, removing the possibility Washington would - and did - look better with a Pac-10 co-championship.
“We spent all week trying to evaluate all the different variables. At the end, it was very difficult to overlook the head-to-head competition (Oregon beat Washington) and that it was a higher-ranked team,” Cotton Bowl executive director Rick Baker said.
Oregon moved up four places in each poll this week (12th) to open up more poll ground on the Huskies (20th AP, 21st CNN/USA Today).
“They moved up that far?” asked Damon Huard, the Husky quarterback, referring to Oregon.
As for the Cotton Bowl decision last week, Huard said, “You’d like to think they’d wait until after the fact and consider all the alternatives. Instead, they went ahead and jumped with Oregon.”
The Cotton Bowl also decided not to wait for the Southwest Conference champion to be determined so it could take a runner-up SWC team, which undoubtedly would have been lower ranked than Colorado.
This is the first year of the Cotton Bowl’s new association with the future Big 12 teams (Big Eight, plus Texas A&M, Texas, Texas Tech and Baylor). The Cotton Bowl picks a top team from that group which did not get to the Bowl Alliance and as its opponent either the Western Athletic Conference champion or a top Pac-10 team not going to the Rose Bowl.
On Saturday, Colorado won the trip to Dallas with a 27-17 victory over Kansas State, and Oregon topped Oregon State 12-10 to claim its bid.
This will mark the second Cotton Bowl appearance for each team. Colorado lost to Rice, 28-14 in the 1938 game, while Oregon fell to SMU, 21-13, in the 1949 game.
“We could have packed it and gone to Hawaii (the Aloha Bowl), but I told them (the Buffs) that Dallas was a much better place to be,” said Neuheisel.
Colorado and Oregon are in a New Year’s Day game for the second straight season. The Ducks lost to Penn State in the Rose Bowl and Colorado defeated Notre Dame 41-24 in the Fiesta Bowl last January.
“To us and many others, this is one of the prestigious bowls in the country,” Bellotti said. “To go to back-to-back Jan. 1 bowls is a great step for our program.”