Fiesta Bowl Lands Spot in Alliance : College football: Arizona event joins Sugar, Orange and Cotton in first step toward national championship game.

By ELLIOTT ALMOND

July 11, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Richard Schultz, executive director of the NCAA, predicted early this year that college football will soon have a playoff system that determines a true national champion.

“It’s coming before you know it,” he said.

In the meantime, officials of four bowls, five conferences and Notre Dame announced Wednesday that they have agreed to form an alliance to make a national championship game more likely each year, starting with the 1992 season.

“This is not a utopia, but it is the closest to it,” said Steve Hatchell, executive director of the Orange Bowl.

The alliance includes the Orange, Cotton, Sugar and Fiesta bowls. The Fiesta Bowl, held at Arizona State’s Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe, was a late choice over the Citrus, Gator, Blockbuster and Holiday bowls as the fourth bowl in the alliance.

Also participating are the Big East and Atlantic Coast conferences, which last year added national title contenders Miami and Florida State, respectively.

The Big Eight’s affiliation with the Orange Bowl will remain unchanged, as will the Southwest Conference’s connection with the Cotton Bowl and the Southeastern Conference’s deal with the Sugar Bowl. As a result, some years the two top-ranked teams simply will not meet.

“The thing is that they’re still trying to make a national championship forgetting half the country,” said Bob Devaney, Nebraska athletic director. “So, it’s not going to be a real national championship, but it will be a little closer than what we have now.”

The framers of the new system said that the biggest change will be in the bowl-selection process. Instead of trying to get commitments in November, when teams still have three regular-season games left, bowl officials will wait until the final poll to make their matchups.

“By getting everybody to wait, you lessen the chance of bad matchups,” said John Reid of the Holiday Bowl in San Diego.

Had it been in effect, the plan would have matched No. 1 Colorado vs. No. 2 Georgia Tech for the 1990 national championship, and No. 1 Colorado vs. No. 2 Miami for the 1989 title--both at the Orange Bowl.

Under the plan, the lineups for the four bowls would be decided by a prearranged system.

After the Big Eight, Southwest and Southeast champions are determined, the other slots for the four bowl games would be filled by a five-team pool including Notre Dame, the champions of the Big East and the ACC, and two other highly ranked at-large teams. The at-large teams could be independents or conference members.

The highest-ranked team in the pool would go to the bowl that offers the highest-ranked opponent. If the Big Eight champion was No. 1 and bound for the Orange Bowl, the highest-ranked team in the pool also would play in Miami on Jan. 1.

“At first, we weren’t sure we wanted to be involved,” Hatchell said. “But we felt that with the complete disappearance of the independent, we needed to protect ourselves with a pool of teams.”

That protection was enhanced by Notre Dame’s agreement to drop out of the pool if it has a mediocre season. The coalition would then select three at-large teams instead of two.

The Fiesta Bowl, which has no conference affiliation, would play host to the national championship game if the five-team pool includes the teams ranked No. 1 and No. 2.

Among the factors in choosing the Fiesta Bowl were location, flexibility in its kickoff time and a payout of more than $6 million.

The Fiesta’s John Junker said the biggest change is NBC’s agreement to allow bowl officials to switch kickoff times to accommodate Pacific 10 Conference teams. The Pac-10 and Big Ten champions are committed to the Rose Bowl, which is not part of the alliance.

Pac-10 teams cannot play in other bowls that have a time conflict with the Rose Bowl.

“We feel we are part of the West Coast,” Junker said. “We can get a top Pac-10 team in here now.”

The Rose Bowl could be the system’s biggest thorn. Rose Bowl officials, who pay about $7 million to each conference, said they were not interested in the alliance.

The last Rose Bowl winner to emerge as the national champion was USC in 1972.