Just read that article ranking Big Ten classes by blue-chip percentage and it just makes me miss the days when a bowl trip was a real reward, not a consolation prize for a lost season. I remember when we'd pack the family car and drive to Orlando for the Citrus Bowl, or San Antonio for the Alamo Bowl, and it felt like a celebration of the whole year. Now with this expanded playoff, finishing 9-3 and going to the Holiday Bowl is treated like a failure. The kids today will never know the joy of watching Ron Dayne plow through UCLA in the 1999 Rose Bowl, because that game doesn't even mean what it used to. We've traded tradition for television money, and the soul of the sport went with it.