JACKSONVILLE, FLA. ? Tailback Leon Washington, perhaps the most popular player on Florida State’s football team, expected to serve as a pseudo-social director this week.

With the Gator Bowl-bound Seminoles spending all week in his hometown of Jacksonville, Washington figured teammates would rely on him to recommend clubs and hot nightspots.

Then, Washington looked at the team itinerary: a Monday-morning practice at 10:20, a Tuesday-morning practice at 9:10, a Wednesday-morning practice at 8:20, a Thursday-morning practice at 10:20.

“We were up early,” Washington said. “It’s like you’ll really hurt yourself if you go out. You’ll be too tired to get up at 7.

“From my standpoint, I didn’t like the schedule at all.”

With 28 bowls this season, thousands of college football players understand the dilemma. Only two of those games, the Orange and Sugar bowls, will have any bearing on the national title.

For everyone else, bowl week can be a time of temptation.

So, is bowl week — normally described as a reward for having a winning season — a time to party or a time to work?

The choices carry consequences.

The Iowa Hawkeyes, in Orlando this week for their Capital One Bowl matchup against LSU, learned a humbling lesson two years ago in Miami as they prepared for the 2003 Orange Bowl.

Without being too specific about exactly how much fun they had in South Beach, some older Iowa players recall that their good times cost them in a 38-17 loss to USC. Last season, in the 2004 Outback Bowl, the Hawkeyes — a little bit wiser — defeated Florida 37-17.

UAB Coach Watson Brown allowed his players to rent mopeds before last week’s Hawaii Bowl. One night in Waikiki, as Brown and his wife waited at an intersection for a traffic light to change, 30 UAB players buzzed through on mopeds.

“He’d talked to a number of coaches who’d been out there before, and some of them had told him they’d made mopeds off-limits,” said Norm Reilly, UAB assistant athletics director. “But he decided we were out there to play a game and have some fun — and riding mopeds is so common out there. He wanted the guys to experience the island.”

One UAB player, a backup defensive end who likely would not have played, crashed his moped two days into the trip and could not play because of a scraped knee.