It looks like I'm going down in The Cure's bowl. My pick, South Florida, is down by 7 with two minutes left to play, and Old Dominion has the ball. I need South Florida to win by six.
I may have been only 14 years old at the time, but back in 1968 even I knew that the sound of surf music was passe. The Ventures reached their commercial peak in the early '60s, and after the Beatles and the Stones and the rest of the British Invasion, and more especially after the rise of San Francisco acid rock and other forms of psychedelic music, the sound of The Ventures was an anachronism. In 1967, Jim Hendrix even went so far as to proclaimed we'd "never hear surf music again" in his breakthrough Third Stone from the Sun.
But everything out of fashion eventually comes back in style, and by the '80s, the sound of twang, Duane Eddy, and The Ventures became popular again and was fully resurgent by the time of Quentin Tarantino's 1994 Pulp Fiction soundtrack. Still, I'm surprised to see that, a full quarter of the way through the 21st Century, there's now a '68 Ventures Bowl.
This game has been around in one form or another since 1999 and has variably been known as the Mobile Alabama Bowl, the GMAC Mobile Alabama Bowl, the GMAC Bowl, the GoDaddy and the GoDaddy.com Bowl, the Dollar General Bowl, and most recently, the LendingTree Bowl. So why not name it after The Ventures? After all, The Cure have a bowl but it is a bit odd that this one's named specifically for the '68 Ventures, a full five years past their peak popularity.
In any event, the '68 Ventures Bowl will host the Louisiana Ragin' Cajuns (6-6) of the Sun Belt Conference against the Delaware Fightin' Blue Hens (6-6) of Conference USA. Who even knew Delaware had a football team? Look, I miss Joe Biden as much as the next guy, but pitting his mid-Atlantic home state against the Cajuns of nearby Lafayette, Louisiana seems a bit overconfident. I will give Delaware kudos for the cooler team name, though - Fightin' Blue Hens is far more original than Ragin' Cajuns. I mean, it's no "The Mammoth," but it's still good.
Surprisingly, there's been no opt-outs announced yet for this game.
I picked Louisiana as 3-point favorites in this game because I won picking them as 3½-point underdogs against the Jacksonville State 'Cocks (heh, heh) in the 2023 New Orleans Bowl. They lost the game, but only by three points and beat the spread. I picked them again in 2024 as 9½-point underdogs to TCU in the New Mexico Bowl. They got blown out by 31 points in that game and I lost the bet, but if I just react willy-nilly changing my bets after each year, the law of averages will work against me (or something like that). I'm sticking with the Cajuns because after three consecutive losses (they lose in 2023, too), they have to win sooner or later and it may as well be this year and it may as well be by three points. Besides, I don't know anything about Delaware or Blue Hens.
Here's The Ventures' 1968 hit, Hawaii Five-O, not the version used in the TV series, but their own surf-music version of the song to get you pumped up for the game. Book 'em, Danno!
No comments:
Post a Comment