Fiesta Bowl never gets tired of Ohio State

COLUMBUS - The football calendar at Ohio State?  It goes something like this ...

April is for spring practice. November is all about Michigan. And January is spent at a bowl game in Arizona.

After being matched up on Sunday night against Texas in the Fiesta Bowl on Jan. 5, Ohio State is making plans for its fifth bowl trip to Arizona in the last seven years.

It's like OSU is the state of Arizona's third-favorite college football team, right after Arizona State and Arizona.

Ohio State's recurring role in the desert started when it won the 2002 season's national championship at the Fiesta Bowl. It returned to that bowl the next season to play Kansas State, then faced Notre Dame there after the 2005 season. Two years ago, it was in the BCS title game against Florida in Glendale, Ariz.

The suspense was taken out of OSU's bowl destination when Oregon cleared Southern California's path to the Rose Bowl by beating Oregon State last week and there were no upsets in the conference championship games over the weekend.

Everybody said Ohio State was going back to the Fiesta Bowl. And everybody was right.

It was a great save for Ohio State (10-2) to get into one of the five BCS bowls after losing its two biggest games of the year and having to point to a trashing of Michigan State as its signature win.

Something delightful could become something dangerous on Jan. 5, though.

Another bad loss on a big stage, after dropping two BCS title games to Florida and LSU by ugly scores the last two seasons, could send Ohio State's national reputation plunging even more.

"Same old Buckeyes," would be the damage assessment. And a once-beaten Texas team that thinks it should be playing for the national championship might be just the team to put those words into the analysts' mouths.

Of course, Ohio State has an incentive to prove it can win the big one and prove the critics wrong. But that same incentive didn't do much to slow down LSU.

Texas isn't the only one feeling unjustly left out of the BCS game it thought it deserved.

Boise State finished the season unbeaten, ranked ahead of Ohio State and with a quality win over Oregon that is probably at least as impressive as OSU's win over Michigan State.

But the Broncos, who beat Oklahoma 43-42 in the 2007 Fiesta Bowl in an instant classic that included a marriage proposal by a star player to his cheerleader girlfriend, will be going to a lesser bowl.

That's just the nature of the BCS and the bowl system.

If this were something like the national spelling bee, the competitors would be chosen on their ability as demonstrated in head-to-head competition. But the bowl system as it exists now is mostly about generating money and attention-grabbing matchups.

One reason Ohio State was more attractive than Boise State is because of its huge fan base. There are 1.4 million people in Idaho. There are 425,000 Ohio State alumni and probably millions more who claim Ohio State as their favorite team without ever attending a class there.

On paper, Ohio State against Texas will make the Fiesta Bowl the third-most attractive game on the bowl schedule after the national championship and the Rose Bowl.

And Ohio State-Texas offers the Fiesta Bowl the potential for much higher television ratings than a Texas-Boise State or Texas-Utah game.

The lowest-rated BCS bowl since that system was created in 1998 was the 2004 Fiesta Bowl between Utah and Pittsburgh, with a 7.4 Nielsen rating. Boise State's fairy tale finish against Oklahoma in the 2007 Fiesta Bowl produced only an 8.4 rating and last year's West Virginia-Oklahoma Fiesta Bowl got a 7.7.

But when Ohio State played Notre Dame, the Nielsen number jumped to a 12.9.

Those factors, along with 10 wins, helped Ohio State get an opportunity to go back to Arizona. We'll find out Jan. 5 what it does with that opportunity.