College football bowl thread: Days of Signs and Roses

4 Birmingham Bowl posts was right on the O/U for total for the entire bowl season.

 

A lot of them do bowling nights or something similar. If the game is anywhere near a major league city and the schedules align, they probably take them to an NBA or NHL game.
When the game in Charlotte was the Belk Bowl, they used to give each player a gift card to Belk (I want to say it was $500) as their participation gift and then take them to a store for a shopping spree. IIRC, that was actually pretty popular with players.

 

Summerall and Brookshier could lead you to some interesting spots.
Oh to be a fly on the wall for those trips.

 

Bowl games today in Birmingham, Montgomery and Mobile. For once, the college football universe does revolve around Alabama, instead of Alabama just thinking it does.

 

Hawaii Bowl took the teams to the USS Arizona Memorial a couple of days ago. Always a notsalgic moment for San Jose State, which was scheduled to play in Honolulu that week.

 

In case anyone wondered what happened to Butch Jones, there he was on the Arkansas State sideline in the Montgomery, Ala., bowl game with his patented “I’m constipated” face.

And a righteous explosion of anger at the end when a flimsy offsides penalty screwed the Red Wolves out of an onside kick recovery.

 

I think I've told this story here, but there's a legend from the Spartan Daily where they had a football reporter covering the game. He wrote a story about the game being cancelled. Never mentions the attack. We dove through the archives and confirmed it.

 

The hell ...?

 

Doubled as a team manager IIRC.

 

My dude is clearly squeezing in some yard work postgame.

 

I do have to wonder though in those times - might have been censored.

 

That's really surprising, but other posters much more fluent in World War II history might be able to shed more light on what was permissible to print in the hours and days after Pearl Harbor. Not making excuses, but I wonder if there were reasons not to mention specifics about the attack because of national security?

In the hours after the attack, Roosevelt and many of the members of his Cabinet weren't certain if the Japanese had the capability to bomb the West Coast, or even land an armed force. There was a documentary I remember that based on paltry U.S. military assets on Dec. 7, 1941, a Japanese invasion might have reached the Mississippi River before Roosevelt could get enough soldiers in place for a reasonable defense.

Roosevelt's military advisors had the intelligence but completely dropped the ball, ignoring obvious signs and signals that the Japanese were planning something big.

I've visited some of the remains of the concrete gun emplacements for coastal defense in San Francisco, and can only imagine the confusion and concern in early 1942 for residents along the Pacific Ocean. More on those here: Guarding the Gate: The Harbor Defenses of San Francisco - Terrain.org

Plus there was the whole "Japanese-American" issue, where Washington politicians were definitely paranoid that the attack in Hawaii might have been an inside job -- the Germans had been using spies with huge success in Europe -- and loyalty was in doubt. Unfortunately, that proved to be a terribly short-sighted and racially-motivated decision that cast a permanent black eye on this country. Nobody put millions of Americans of German ancestry in detention camps, even though there were several Nazi spy incidents during the war. Disgraceful.

And while researching the 1963 North Carolina state football championship, which was held on the night of the Kennedy assassination, the sports editor of the Rocky Mount Telegram never mentioned the events in Dallas. I get "news" stories and "sports" stories -- plus the bigotry of the times -- but the President gets killed and there wasn't a moment of silence or even thought about a sidebar reaction piece?

EDIT: @DanOregon said in one sentence what I wrote in Ragu paragraphs!