One last bowl

This is the week of the BCS before we transition to the NFL wild card weekend. When the bowl schedule came out, it' didn't look too appetizing this year. Part of the problem was that the BCS championship game is a rematch that really didn't get a whole lot of us excited. There were a couple of good match-ups, but it looked like slim pickings. But the BCS bowls since the New Years day have been pretty good. Wisconsin-Oregon stayed true to form and Oregon won in a thrilling Rose Bowl. Then the best game of the BCS season was as expected the Fiesta Bowl featuring Stanford and Oklahoma state. Andrew Luck had an amazing game, but lost anyways. I like David Shaw - Stanford's coach, but he went far to the right - too conservative on this one. Shaw let a red-shirt freshman decide the game with a 35 yard field goal and sure enough, he kicked it away right in to Oki state's hands.

Given that these are not professional kickers making millions for these field goals, this is equivalent to a 45 yarder by NFL standard. You then add 5 more yards for the high-pressure situation - it should actually be higher for the college kids, but I will keep it at the standard 5 yards for both the NFL and college. I would say this was a 50 yarder for the kid by NFL standards. You should not be depending on 50 yard field goals to win games, not when you have Luck driving your car and navigating it beautifully. Shaw went ultra-conservative at the wrong time and let a lot of plays and timeouts go to waste. One of my pet peeves in football is coaches stalling way too early on their final drive and asking their kickers to boot long, hard field goals. Never made sense to me. And Shaw paid the price. The game went to OT and state won it there with a field goal of their own after the Stanford kid missed another one. Luck should be disappointed, but I think his NFL career is still in good hands.

The Sugar Bowl was also an overtime affair as Va Tech figured out a way to lose after out-gaining Michigan all game. A win in the Sugar Bowl is a great start for the Brady Hoke era for the big blue, but they better get ready for some serious challenges down the road as Urb is coming to Columbus. Hoke is happy to have Denard Robinson on his side though. The Orange Bowl was a rather weird affair where West Virginia scored 70 on the Clemson tigers. Clemson showed us how to score 33 points, win the first quarter, tie the 4-Th, and still lose by 37. If only they figured out how to defend that stupid toss play that West Virginia ran a million times. All this leads us to the title game Monday. It's a rerun and I expect the result to be the same as well. LSU is really the better team though Alabama's Nick Saban is the better coach. Lets just hope it's better than a 9-6 snoozer. By the way, I also expect the Pittsburgh Steelers, New Orleans Saints, Atlanta Falcons and Cincinnati Bengals to have won their way to the next round of the NFL playoffs by the time this championship game rolls around.