For the first time in 24 years, an Illinois football season is going to end the way we all hope, back in September, that it will end: with a trip to the Rose Bowl.

Forget the BCS. Forget all the different proposals for a playoff system. If I were the king of the world, we’d play a 10-game Big Ten schedule (*), and the winner would go to the Rose Bowl and get beat by Southern California. That’s all I want from college football.

It’s the goal at the beginning of every football season: go to the Rose Bowl and play a road game against USC. Winning the game is a nice bonus, but the goal is to go to the Rose Bowl.

We didn’t win the Big Ten, but a good second place finish, combined with some goofy BCS by-laws, delivered some poetic justice for 2002, when the BCS took away our legitimate Rose Bowl bid and made us go slumming in the Sugar Bowl instead. But not this year: we’re going to Pasadena.

(*) The 2-game non-conference schedule worked out fine when the Big Ten played a 9-game round robin. A 10-game schedule would work even better than a 9-game schedule, since there wouldn’t be problems with four home games versus five. I would have preferred to see us play Purdue (a trophy game not on the calendar!) and MSU, rather than Ball State and Syracuse.

Posted by Ben Brothers at 10:54 pm, 2 December 2007 and filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.