INDIANAPOLIS. College Bowl, the '60's quiz show that pitted Phi Beta Kappas from competing colleges against each other, is set to return this fall as the NCAA fights to put the "student" back in "student-athlete" after recent embarrassments such as Vince Young's single-digit score on the Wonderlic exam.
"We talked to Vince about it," said NCAA President Myles Brand, referring to the University of Texas quarterback who scored only six out of a possible fifty points on the aptitude test administered by the NFL. "In his defense, six is the most you can score on a single play in football, so we're not going to come down too hard on him."
Instead, taking a cue from the producers of "The New Hollywood Squares", the NCAA will sponsor "The New College Bowl", a souped-up version of the show that National Honor Society Presidents watched on Saturday afternoons as dreams of full-boat academic scholarships glided through their already-crowded brains.
The fuel that's been added to the intellectual fire this time around? A high-stakes Texas Hold 'Em format in which student contestants can wager their schools' endowments on questions like "Name King Lear's three daughters in reverse alphabetical order."
"We were brainstorming one night and I said--Hey, if Harvard is so smart, let them go all in on the flop, instead of just sitting up there in Massachusetts sneering at the rest of the country," Brand said. Harvard University's endowment was valued at $25.9 billion as of the end of 2005.
Even at the height of its popularity, College Bowl never attracted more than a miniscule audience. Its most lasting impression on the American consciousness may have been left by the movie "Diner", in which Kevin Bacon, playing Timothy Fenwick, Jr., mocks contestants as he watches the show.
In the same movie Steve Guttenberg, playing Eddie Simmons, gives his fiancee a test on the history of the Baltimore Colts as a condition to finalizing their marriage, but Brand said there were no plans to add pro football as a category. "We've got to be careful we don't cause our young people to lose their amateur standing," he said.
The most famous College Bowl matchup was undoubtedly the triple-overtime match between the University of Chicago and Brandeis University that was won on a last-second "Hail Mary" by Eugene Firke, a pre-med major from Chicago, who correctly named all elements of the periodic table in pig Latin, begininng with "ydrogenhay".
LOS ANGELES, California. USC head football coach Pete Carroll today demanded a recount of the Trojans' 41-38 loss to Texas in the Rose Bowl following the disclosure that Longhorns' quarterback Vince Young answered just six of 50 questions correctly on the Wonderlic test, the intelligence exam used by NFL teams to rate college players.
"That was a high scoring game, and Young had 467 total yards. You're telling me he did all that in his head, without a calculator?" Carroll said, his voice dripping with sarcasm.
Facing a fourth-and-five with 19 seconds left on the clock, Young scored the game-winning touchdown on an eight-yard scramble. Southern California, whose double-Heisman duo of Matt Leinart and Reggie Bush produced 939 total yards, failed to advance into field goal range as time expired. Had the two teams' offenses continued in opposite directions averaging 4.2 yards per play, how long would it have taken for them to meet in NFL Europe? Show your calculations.
Carroll said he and his assistants would spend some time over the next few days proofreading the Texas roster to bolster their case. "We already found a kid--Ramonce Taylor--who apparently doesn't know how to spell 'Romance'. My guess is their score will go way down by the time we're through."
Young, who lost out to USC's Reggie Bush in this year's Heisman Trophy voting, defended his mental credentials in the face of Carroll's sore-loser crusade. "Tell him to close his eyes, say the words 'bonehead lateral' and see who comes to mind."
Con Chapman is a Boston-area writer. He is the author of "The Year of the Gerbil: How the Yankees Won (and the Red Sox Lost) the Greatest Pennant Race Ever," a history of the 1978 AL East pennant race, and a number of plays, including "Number One Hockey Mom," "Please, Pope," and "What Mickey Belle Isle Told You," a trilogy about hockey (JAC Publishing). His work is available on Amazon Shorts (at 49 cents a dowload), and he writes on sports for Flak Magazine.
