JACKSON `LIKED IT THE WAY IT WAS'.

Byline: TOM HOFFARTH Media

It's not Keith Jackson's call who gets to play for college football's proclaimed national championship. He just has to call it.

So trying to prod him into moaning and/or groaning about how the Bowl Championship Series computers spit out Nebraska and Miami for the Jan. 3 Rose Bowl won't get you far.

``I won't lapse into wailing on the BCS - it is what it is,'' Jackson said during a recent conference call.

Yet, if ABC's voice of college football has a little more time to clear his throat, he will wax melancholic about the way things are run these days vs. how they were when he began calling the sport in the mid-1960s.

``Personally, I'm not a big fan and I do miss it,'' he admits when asked about the current arrangement that spreads the top bowl games over three consecutive prime-time telecasts.

``When we had the big four bowl games - and whatever happened to the Cotton Bowl? - the whole day was wonderful, and it would end in Pasadena while we watched eating turkey leftovers. We won't get that back. Everything's changed.

``I liked it the way it was. Teams were proud to be going to a bowl game, and proud of winning a conference championship, even finishing third in a conference. Now, you can't be proud if you've finished third anymore. There's so much emphasis on winning to get bowl money to fund things at the school.

``But this ship has been sailed and, if it's a storm, we'll sail through it. But changes are coming, there's no doubt.''

Changes already have arrived, big guy.

The traditional Pacific-10 Conference vs. Big Ten Conference matchup has been shoved over to Tempe, Ariz. There's about a 55-hour wait between the end of the Rose Parade and the start of the Rose Bowl.

Again, it's not really Jackson's vision of the way things should be.

``I'm an old-timer who thinks the Rose Bowl with a Pac-10 and Big Ten matchup this year would have been hell on wheels,'' he said. ``And if I'm from Illinois, I'd be pissed. They're the most ignored 10-1 team I've seen.

``There will be a curiosity factor (for the Rose Bowl). The Fiesta Bowl (between Oregon and Colorado) will have already been played, so the real college football fan will be hunkered down to see what happens. We may lose some casual viewers. But what we've got is what we've got.

``Everyone knew the rules going in and knew this could happen. TV isn't responsible. We took the package and we haven't engineered anything. It's the college football community's product and we bought it.''

--No wilted predictions: ABC senior vice president of programming Loren Matthews says that in the past, a Rose Bowl telecast that begins at 5 p.m. on the East Coast has drawn anything from a low-13 to a mid-17 rating when it's on Jan. 1.

Last year's Washington-Purdue matchup was about a 14, and the national-championship game from the Orange Bowl between Oklahoma and Florida State was a 17.8 - which is about what Matthews predicts for the upcoming Rose Bowl. The Fiesta Bowl matchup also should jump from a year ago because the winner could be the eventual national champ if Miami loses.

``For three straight years, the ratings have been going up (for the national-title game), and last year trailed only the Super Bowl and the two NFL conference title games (for viewers for a sporting event),'' Matthews said.

``You need two things for a strong rating in these bowl games: Anticipation puts tails in the seats before the kickoff, then you need a terrific game. We can do well with either, but with both, you'll do really well.''

--More college football retrospective: Credit CBS for commissioning a 90-minute documentary called ``The Bear: The Legend of Coach Paul Bryant,'' which airs at 2:30 p.m. Saturday.

Black Canyon Productions, honored with several Peabody and Emmy awards for its work on sports documentaries going back to the three-part ``When It Was A Game'' for HBO, oversaw the project that goes deep into Bryant's contradictory career with many revealing interviews.

``He created a persona he knew the public would enjoy and accept and he could use to further the University of Alabama,'' Jackson said in the piece about Bryant, who died in 1983, just a month after coaching his final game in the Liberty Bowl.

The special includes plenty of details about Bryant's plan to integrate the Crimson Tide's program by inviting John McKay to bring USC out to Tuscaloosa, Ala., for a game in 1970. It also shows how Bryant's switch to a wishbone offense the following year helped him pull off a win against the Trojans at the Coliseum in the '71 opener, which also set the tone for Alabama's success during the decade.

Bryant's name has added significance this season since Penn State's Joe Paterno passed him on the career-victory list, and Florida State's Bobby Bowden is one away from Bryant's 323 wins going into the Jan. 1 Gator Bowl.

WHAT SMOKES

--Paul Sunderland's work during the absence of Chick Hearn on the Lakers' broadcasts has taken getting used to - that's natural - but it's no surprise he's risen to the occasion. He's on top of everything and his knowledge of the league is right on. Maybe more surprising is also how analyst Stu Lantz has brought up his game a notch. If anything, this proves we'll all be saddened when Hearn eventually isn't there, but his predecessor will come certified.

--How would Howard Cosell react to Jon Voight's portrayal of him in the new Will Smith flick ``Ali?'' Since Cosell died in 1995, The New York Times' Richard Sandomir did his best newspaper version of Rich Little when he wrote this week: ``No one ... is capable of fully conveying my gravitas in a film ... Dull, somber, humorless, modest, temperate, lacking in bombast. I am, you will recall, none of these. Yet, on screen, I am. .. At times, Voight's voice and cadence echo mine. But his facial prosthetics and makeup turn him so expressionless that he can barely move his mouth enough to imitate my vulpine chuckle. And his hairpiece is not only a tonsorial miscalculation, it is a misrepresentation of its time.''

--ESPN Classic has a 24-hour tribute this weekend to Dick Schaap, the respected journalist who died last week after complications following hip-replacement surgery. Starting at 9 a.m. Saturday, the shows include many of his one-on-one interviews with famous athletes and ends with ``Flashing Before My Eyes,'' the ESPN-produced two-hour show based on Schaap's recent autobiography.

WHAT CHOKES

--Another ABC ``Wide World of Sports'' retrospective? This 40th anniversary prime-time show (Saturday, 8 p.m.) shows us no one's ever tired of old barrel-jumping, cliff-diving and wrist-wrestling highlights. Jim McKay, who hosted the first ``Wide World'' show on April 29, 1961, will lead us through the motions again.

--Seen any of the interviews Deion Sanders has done this year for CBS' NFL pregame show? Sunday, he hooks up with the Rams' Marshall Faulk.

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