This is a ? that I asked Rose Bowl Frog in another thread about bowl games :unsure:
Rose Bowl Frog, the team seemed to learn from the experience of what happened at the Fiesta Bowl that heleped for the focus and preparation at the Rose Bowl. Can you comment on that?
At the Fiesta Bowl I think things got out of hand. Yeah, every bowl I went to(5 of them) we had guys staying out late at night and doing undesirable things. But the difference was that the first 3 bowls I went to we were only there for a handful of days, so we only had a night or two to stay out late. At the Fiesta Bowl it was a whole week, so we had several nights to stay out late. I think this caused a lot of our guys to "make connections" around the Scottsdale area and want to revisit those places.
So on the nights of January 2/January 3, when curfew was a lot earlier, we had a lot of guys ignore it and still stay out late at night doing stupid things. On January 3, the night before the game, we had people sneak out of their hotel rooms and go out. It wasn't hard to do since the hotel resort property was gigantic and a lot of people were either on the 1st or 2nd floor, so all they had to do was walk out the back door of their hotel room and that was it. It wasn't a normal hotel where there are only a few ways in and out, it was a huge property that was very open spaced and really had no boundaries. So it was very easy to sneak out of the place. Anyway, they'd sneak out of their rooms and get picked up by their friends and stay out all night. There were several guys who rolled back into the hotel at around 8 in the morning that day. I think the problem with the Fiesta Bowl trip was too many people treated it as a vacation rather than a week to prepare to win a game.
The Rose Bowl was different. The coaching staff really didn't tighten up curfew or enforce any new rules, but it was more of the seniors and players self policing each other and holding each other accountable. We really wanted to win. I am not saying we didn't have guys go out and stay out late and do stupid things, I would say more players than not did, but it was more toned down. A couple nights in to our trip we had an incident where some of our key players were robbed at a party and stayed out past curfew, and 2 walk on players came in past curfew. Well, our coaching staff got pretty mad and chewed us out pretty bad, and sent those 2 walk ons home on a greyhound bus to send an example. A lot of us were kind of pissed because we felt that if those 2 walk ons get sent home, so should the key players that were out late as well, but I guess we needed those key players for the game. I feel that equal treatment should have been applied to be fair. But after that, not a single person broke curfew the rest of the trip and our guys were a lot more responsible. It was that kind of message that needed to be sent, I think. Throw that in with the fact that a lot of seniors weren't going to put up with any bull[Craig James](some of us got vocal at times), the problem took care of itself.
Bowl games are tricky, because our coaching staff doesn't want to babysit, and they know that our guys are going to do stupid things. Hell, each bowl trip I went to, as soon as we got to our hotel and had our meeting with the police chief, 90% of the team would do a mass exodus from the hotel to the nearest place to buy liquor. The only way to keep this from being a problem is the team policing itself and being accountable to each other. I think we did this just enough to win the Rose Bowl. At the Poinsettia Bowl(2nd one) I don't think we were there long enough for it to affect us.
