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[50's PONY]

Frogs undercut by C-USA
On-the-fence TCU has bowl wishes ignored
By Gil Lebreton
Star-Telegram Staff Writer

The invitation has been graciously accepted.

TCU officials said Monday night the Horned Frogs will be happy to be the host team for the inaugural PlainsCapital Fort Worth Bowl.

Athletic director Eric Hyman called it "the toughest five days of my professional career," and he probably has the long distance phone bills to prove it.

On behalf of an 11-1 football team, the school's most successful in 65 years, Hyman took a tough stand and had the resolve -- some may call it "audacity" -- to see it through.

"The team finished 11-1, they did a hell of a job, and they got caught in some of the politics that were going on," Hyman said.

And therein sits the ugly side of this football story.

It wasn't that TCU chose to, for lack of a better phrase, play the academic card. As early as mid-November, Hyman said he informed Conference USA commissioner Britton Banowsky that because of the school's examination schedule, "We had a problem and could not play [in the GMAC Mobile Bowl]."

The dirty part of this story also wasn't that TCU had a prior "arrangement" to stay at home and play in the Fort Worth Bowl.

"I have never had one conversation with Pete Derzis [of ESPN] about playing in the Fort Worth Bowl," Hyman asserted Monday night.

Nor was the unseemly story that the Horned Frogs were somehow trying to duck a so-called quality opponent in Miami of Ohio.

"I would love to play Miami-Ohio," said Hyman, who was the AD at Miami before coming to TCU. "That's why we played Nebraska to open the season a year after we lost 28 seniors. That's why we tried to schedule Virginia Tech.

"This was totally, pure and simple, an academic issue."

No, the ugly side of the Frogs' bowl saga is that grown men, trying to settle some imagined score with TCU, banded together and tried to keep a bowl reward away from young men who richly deserved it.

As long as there have been bowl games, there have been deals bargained in smoke-filled rooms. If the Cotton Bowl, for example, couldn't get a Top-10 matchup, it shook enough hands to land a Doug Flutie, a Bo Jackson. Everyone seemed to go away happy.

But Jerry Silverstein, president of the Mobile Bowl, didn't want to take TCU's no for an answer. The question is why.

Why would any bowl official want to invite a team that said it couldn't come, whose students wouldn't be able to come, and whose fans didn't want to come?

Silverstein reportedly claims nobody told him until days after the TCU loss at Southern Miss that the Frogs wouldn't be able to come. Banowsky, the C-USA commissioner, told Hyman he informed Silverstein of TCU's intentions in mid-November.

Somebody is not telling the truth.

Around the country, supposedly, TCU has been getting scorched for trying to break the league's contract with the Mobile Bowl. In truth, that contract has always been written in fuzzy ink. Former commissioner Mike Slive suggested as much last year when, in announcing the deal with the then-new Sheraton Hawaii Bowl, he said the conference's four other bowl games would be allotted by taking into account "regional and various" considerations.

But Mobile pushed. And the people who run the athletic departments around C-USA stood back and allowed them.

Why?

Connect the dots. The dots that have TCU rumored to be leaving C-USA and bolting to the Mountain West Conference.

Having turned down the Mobile game, it was no secret TCU's choice was the Sheraton Hawaii Bowl. But Houston was awarded the invitation Monday to play in the Hawaii game.

Houston is staying in Conference USA.

Memphis will play North Texas in the New Orleans Bowl.

Memphis is staying in Conference USA.

See a pattern?

Only when Louisville agreed Monday night to fill the spot in the Mobile Bowl was a bowl berth for TCU finally secured.

A group of adults, trying to wage a grudge against other adults, nearly stole something away from a few dozen deserving kids.

If TCU aims to keep its integrity intact, it will leave this dying mess called Conference USA as soon as possible.


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Gil LeBreton, (817) 390-7760 sports@star-telegram.com





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© 2003 Star Telegram and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
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[FWMustang]

Call the boys in white jackets to come pick up LeBreton and the other TCU lackeys who think this way. They have lost their marbles!!!

Did TCU invent the internet too? That's what they are starting to sound like.

[Hoofbeat83]

this guy must have obtained a PhD in spin doctory from tcu.

integrity? graciousness? sell that in mobile and in ohio (or in dallas or houston for that matter).

what a bunch of losers.

[Dement-ed]

I usually think Gil Lebreton has a brain in his head. Two statements in this column lead me to believe otherwise:

1.
Having turned down the Mobile game, it was no secret TCU's choice was the Sheraton Hawaii Bowl.

Right. Why would they want the cushy deal of playing in their home stadium on national TV when they could risk going out to Hawaii and face a potent passing team with a very real chance of winning -- in ITS HOME STADIUM? (Cougar High showed how well TCU defends the pass.)

2.
If TCU aims to keep its integrity intact, it will leave this dying mess called Conference USA as soon as possible.

Gil, you're killing me. For the sake of your credibility as a journalist, I have one request: in future columns, do not ever -- EVER -- use the words "TCU" and "integrity" in the same sentence again.