One lesson that can be taken from this college football season is you can't base your bowl projections on logic.
The Holiday Bowl is the case in point. I simply don't understand why either Nebraska or Arizona are spending part of their December in San Diego. The Cornhuskers won the Big 12 North, played a great game before falling to Texas by a point in the conference championship game and have a huge fan base that travels and must be excited by the revitalization of the program. So the Cotton Bowl, which picks Big 12 teams before the Holiday, takes Oklahoma State. Huh? The Cowboys had a nice start to the season by defeating Georgia but had some injuries, lost star WR Dez Bryant over eligibility rules and just didn't excite anyone during the rest of the campaign like they did last year.
Nebraska is where the fun is in the Big 12 right now outside Austin. The Holiday Bowl, which always seems to live right, is getting a huge gift with the Cornhuskers.
The curiosity about Arizona is with the Holiday officials themselves. The Wildcats strike me as being the least marketable team of those they could take, the others being Stanford and Oregon State. As mentioned last week, the Cardinal has a Heisman candidate in RB Toby Gerhart and a local favorite in coach Jim Harbaugh. Oregon State has its own coach who is popular here in town, Mike Riley, and is led by a former Carlsbad HS quarterback.
The problem is I've never heard of OSU having a reputation of traveling well and Stanford fans absolutely don't. The Farm has a ton of alumni in Southern California, however. Arizona? Well, you don't need to say anything to a 'zonie to get them to pack their bags other than the words "San" and "Diego," in that order. They're close and they'll come. Look for a lot of slow and swerving drivers on I-8 in the week after Christmas.
All that said, Arizona as a football team does not lack for attractiveness. They beat the Beavers and the Cardinals. There's a worthy tiebreaker, but remember we're not going on logic here, right? Even better, those two games, along with their loss to Oregon, might have been the three most exciting in the Pac-10 all year. Throw out routs of weak Washington State and UCLA, the average margin of victory or loss in conference was a little over four points. Sophomore Nick Foles looks like an excellent quarterback.
Logical choices? No. Potential for a great game with an offense vs. defense matchup? Oh, yes. The Holiday Bowl lives right for another year.
The Poinsettia teams, Cal and Utah, were pretty much locked in by the order of finish in the Pac-10 and Mountain West, and the desires of other bowls. With Cal RB Jahvid Best likely out of the game because of a concussion, this one has the looks of being kind of ugly, just a year after being one of the best post-season matches of all with TCU's 17-16 win over Boise State.
So the game chosen on pure logic gets a yucky matchup. The game with selections that confuse me has one of the better pairings of the bowl season. Funny how it works.
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My final Heisman ballot, if I had a vote:
1. Colt McCoy, Texas QB
2. Toby Gerhart, Stanford RB
3. Andy Dalton, TCU QB
4. Ndamukong Suh, Nebraska DT
5. Mark Ingram, Alabama RB
The media is so infatuated with the Crimson Tide this season that I bet Ingram wins the award, but Texas will handle 'bama by a couple TDs in the BCS championship.
2 comments:
Toby Gerhart is already one of the best players in college football and if Standford can keep him together with Andrew Luck they could contend for the PAC 10 for the next couple years and maybe a national championship.
It would be bad news for Stanford if Gerhart and Luck stayed together because Gerhart is a senior! However, I bet Tyler Gaffney from Cathedral becomes a Toby clone.
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