It had been less than one day that the University of Phoenix Stadium hosted a professional football game between the Arizona Cardinals and the Green Bay Packers.

As the final fans were filing out of the stadium, workers began assembling to transform the venue from the NFL to college football. Since the University of Phoenix Stadium opened in 2006 it has been the home not only to the Cardinals but also to the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl.

Because vendors and sponsors are different between the two events, workers would spend the night taking down signage from the NFL and replacing it with signage for a college football bowl game.

It would start with the banners around the field and would continue to the concourses of the stadium. The turf would have the Cardinals logos removed with the end zones and midfield repainted to feature college football names and teams.

The Tostitos Fiesta Bowl is one of the Bowl Championship Series bowls meaning there will be a national audience that will tune into the telecast or experience the game in person. Besides the stadium, the parking facilities also go through a transformation.

In the adjacent park area a fan experience area has been erected with inflatables, stages, and other activities. These will be open and available all day and during the game allowing fans who do not have tickets to still enjoy the game’s festivities.

For the first time in Tostitos Fiesta Bowl history, the game consisted of two non-BCS football teams with the undefeated Boise State Broncos facing the undefeated Texas Christian University Horned Frogs.

This is a game that leaves me struggling on who to root for. On the one hand I’m originally from Idaho and would love to see Boise State win. On the other hand TCU plays in the Mountain West Conference and a win by the Horned Frogs would benefit BYU’s season ending ranking. In the end I’ll just root for whoever has the ball.

When the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl ends, the fans will file out the door leaving stadium workers to begin the process once again to get ready for the National Football League playoff game that will be held here on Sunday. The work never seems to end which is a good thing for Arizona sports fans.

I should probably preface this by saying I am not a huge follower of college football; at least not to the extent that I follow baseball. That being said, I do keep tabs on how the season is progressing and of course I follow my alma mater and the local teams.

Given my foot injury this past weekend and the fact that I have already watched all of the baseball games I have on the TiVo at least a million times I turned my attention to the college football games on the television.

I watched as Alabama dissected the Florida Gators and came away believing the Crimson Tide have to be considered the favorite to achieve a national championship. Shortly after that game ended I flipped over to see how the other side of the equation would play out in the game between the Nebraska Cornhuskers and the University of Texas Longhorns.

Like many other sports fans I have taken my share of shots at the Bowl Championship Series and lamented that there is no playoffs for college football. Each year as the season ends it seems like we are left with more questions than answers as to who the national champion should be.

This year the table was set for a nightmare. With number one Florida losing to number two Alabama some of the complaints would be satisfied since it meant there was one less undefeated team in the country.

TCU of the Mountain West conference has finished their undefeated season and going into the weekend they were ranked number four. Boise State likewise ends the season undefeated and they too have an argument to be included in a BCS bowl despite not playing in a BCS conference.

When the Cincinnati Bearcats came from behind to beat Pittsburgh they finished the regular season undefeated and staked their claim for a chance to play for the national championship.

The stage was set for what could be a disaster for the BCS when Texas took the field against Nebraska. For most of that game the Huskers walked all over Texas. While the score was close, the play really wasn’t.

With time running out on the Longhorns, Heisman candidate Colt McCoy made a critical mistake lobbing the ball to the sideline with time running out. The game clock went to zero and Nebraska players rushed the field in celebration.

Not so fast, the officiating crew huddled together and decided one second should be put back onto the clock allowing Texas a chance at one last play. In a scene reminiscent of the 1972 Olympic basketball game in Munich where the USSR is allowed a second chance to win, the Longhorns kicked the field goal leaving Nebraska players, coaches, and fans wondering what had happened.

With Texas winning, that meant there were five undefeated teams. Obviously all of these teams could not play for the national championship and with two teams coming from non-BCS conferences it was even more unlikely that the bowl system could produce an undisputed national champion.

Almost as soon as the clock expired (a second time) in the Texas game people were already clamoring for the abolishment of the BCS in favor of a better system for crowning a champion.

I am usually one of those opponents but as I thought about it I realized that abolishing the BCS and the bowl structure that is currently in place would be the worst thing that college football could do for their sport.

If you stop to think about it, the faults of the BCS each year means that sports fans throughout the country continue to talk about college football for weeks or perhaps months. The discussions usually swirl around the lack of fairness but regardless of the discussion content people are still talking about the product.

If the BCS was abolished and a playoff format was implemented, the drama that comes from a team being slighted disappears. College football would get sports coverage during the playoff itself but once that is over, discussion pretty much stops until next season.

With the current format they can almost guarantee that somewhere someone is talking about college football and the BCS almost every day of the year. There really is something to be said about creating a flawed system.

Everyone wants to fix the problem but by doing so the NCAA has assured them of interest that they would never get if they really solved the issues of the BCS.

So the one thing you can about guarantee yourself is that with the final whistle on January 7 the discussions will continue for weeks about what the NCAA can do to fix the national championship problem. As the old advertising adage says, you can’t buy that kind of publicity.

I grew up in a small farming community in Idaho. At the time I thought I grew up in a big city in Idaho but it wasn’t until after I graduated from college and moved to Arizona that I realized that the entire population of my home town would fit within the confines of Chase Field and it would not be a sell-out. I then had to come to grips with the fact that I was from a hick town in Idaho. Living in Idaho was kind of like living in Bedrock with the Flintstones. I take that back, even the Flintstones had phones even if they were made of rocks and shells. There were places in Idaho that did not get telephone service until this century. We did however get television. Not cable mind you, that would have to wait until my senior year of high school before that arrived. No, television in our day consisted of 3 channels: NBC, ABC, and CBS. Wow, I sound so old when I say that. My kids would say I wasn’t really living at that point; it was more just a matter of survival. They may be right. Whenever I go back to visit my parents I feel as though I stepped into a time machine and am teleported back into the dark ages. I half expect to turn the corner and see them burning a witch at the stake or something.

Growing up I have two distinct television memories. The first was the NBC baseball game of the week. Every Saturday morning I would get up early and get my chores done so that I could spend time watching the game of the week. I loved Curt Gowdy and Joe Gargiola and their commentary. I was introduced to this program by my grandfather who nurtured a love of baseball within me that continues to this day.
The other program that I watched religiously was the Wide World of Sports hosted by Jim McKay. Each week Mr. McKay would take us to what I considered exotic places and introduced us sports I may never had an opportunity to witness. Travel was extremely limited in those days. The farthest we would ever travel would be a couple of hours to go fishing or three hours to visit relatives. The thought of someone travelling the globe in search of sports and athletes was incomprehensible. I lived vicariously through Jim McKay dreaming of being there watching the various sports that he found or seeing the sites that he described. When ABC happened to cover the Olympics I was further mesmerized by Jim McKay as he took us to each event. I was there in 1972 in Munich when he reported the Israeli hostage situation and its demise with the loss of the athletes. He reported it in such a way that everyone the world over mourned not just the loss of these athletes but the changing of our world forever. No program and no announcer ever touched my heart the way he did in my youth. When news arrived today that he had passed I could not help but think that Jim McKay has begun yet another journey spanning the afterlife looking for the constant variety in sport. He will be sorely missed but he will never be forgotten.