I’m so happy that the Big-10 and PAC-12 are now finally playing Championship Games. Too bad the BigEast and Big-12 can’t but still get BCS bids. And, both of the new championship games were great despite the PAC-12 having to send UCLA to their game.
For those of you that are wondering, I finished this year at 93.8% accuracy on my college picks despite going 8-2 this week.
Toss a coin, grab a seat and let’s get on with this week…
GAMES OF THE WEEK:
The Big-10 Championship
#15 Wisconsin over #13 Michigan State 42-39
This was the best game of the weekend. Wow. If you didn’t get to
see it, go watch it. The rematch was even better then the Hail Mary MSU win during the regular season. Wisconsin now will get to play Oregon in the Rose Bowl and that should be a really good game as well. I really think that is Michigan State hadn’t committed those two turnovers this game could have had a different outcome. Oh and that running into the kicker call at the end of the game was just heartbreaking for Sparty. The win was there, but so was the flag. But alas, the Badgers are now the Big-10 Champions for the second straight year. I’m really just happy it’s somebody other than Ohio State or Michigan.The ACC Championship
#20 Clemson over #5 Virginia Tech 38-10
Who would have thought that the ACC would have put on such a good game. The final score doesn’t show just how close this game was. The score was tied at 10 in the 3rd before Clemson pulled away and will probably move on to the Orange Bowl. Clemson Head Coach Dabo Sweeney had some choice words for all those people “that quit on us” after the game. Can you really blame Clemson fans though? The team started off 8-0 and then lost two conference games and went into this game at 9-3. And, they’re Clemson fans, they know that traditionally their team sucks it up towards the end of the year. This is Clemson’s first conference championship in 20 years and it has to give that team a lot of satisfaction after falling apart late in the year. Whomever gets VT in the bowl game will have a tough test because that is a really good team too.
The PAC-12 Championship
#9 Oregon over UCLA 49-31
UCLA got in this game because USC was ineligible and surprisingly put on a good show pushing Oregon a bit. However, the Ducks
were just waaaay too fast and UCLA just looked slow on both sides of the ball. The Bruins had a shot to make this a really good game in the 3rd, but stalled out and then LaMichael James closed it out. Oregon gets to go to the Rose Bowl after winning their 3rd straight PAC-12 title (the fist with an actual title game however) and UCLA gets to file an appeal with the NCAA to go to a bowl game with a losing record. Sad. Actually they were already granted approval by the NCAA, but really does it matter? They fired their coach last week, let him coach this game but he won’t coach the bowl game. Normally I hate FOX’s broadcasters, but the guy doing this game was awesome. He was so into it and very emotional on any big play. It was just fun to listen to him.The SEC Championship
#1 LSU over #14 Georgia 42-10
Tale of two halves anyone? Wow. Georgia started out alright but
LSU’s defense was just too good and Georgia’s special teams once again sucked it up. Three turnovers in the game by the Dawgs and all those dropped passes didn’t help out much either. Georgia left about 21 points off the board thanks to those dropped passes. I was not buying all that upset talk this week. Georgia hasn’t been able to run the ball for over a month now and if your hopes rely on Aaron Murray having a ‘huge’ day, then your hopes are lost. LSU on the other hand demonstrated how to win championships with great defense and a stable of guys who can run the ball. LSU is just too good and now will have about a month off before playing for the National Championship at 13-0. Will it be Bama? Will it be OKS? We’ll find out tonight. As a Georgia fan, I guess I’ve got to be happy with a 10 win season as long as the Dawgs can pull off a bowl win. The Outback Bowl?Honorable Mentions:
#3 Oklahoma State wins the Big-12 over #10 Oklahoma 44-10
#17 Baylor winning the state over #22 Texas 48-24
#11 Kansas State winning Farmageddon over Iowa State 30-23
UPSET OF THE WEEK:
Conference USA Championship
#24 Southern Miss over #6 Houston 49-28
Oh No! Houston was just cruising along and looking for a BCS bid with an undefeated recor
d. Guess Southern Miss had other plans. Some say Houston was distracted by all the talk surrounding their coach leaving next year. I don’t think that was the case with all that was on the line and with a chance to get into a BCS. Now both Southern Mississippi and Houston will finish with 11 wins (12 for Houston) but neither will go to a BCS game. Now while I think Conference USA has produced two very good teams this year, I just find it really funny (and sad) that neither will go to a BCS game while a crap BigEast team will. This will cost each school in the conference about $500,000 because of not getting to a BCS game. The Southern Miss coach may think his team deserves to go… they don’t.PILLOW FIGHT OF THE WEEK:
The MAC Championship
Northern Illinois over Ohio 23-20There were some awesome plays in this game and NIU had to come from 20 points down to win it, so this was an impressive Friday night High School football game. Wait what? Oh the MAC is a college conference? Anyway, the MAC Champs hopefully will get to go play a BigEast school in a bowl game and destroy them. That would just be awesome. A total of 13,052 people were in attendance for this game. So that leads me to believe that the MAC fans had better things to do on a Friday night than watch their championship game. Ohio had a 20-0 lead at half and then just forgot how to play defense. There were 7 total turnovers in this game and NIU ended up winning it on a last second field goal. So, a classic Pillow Fight Championship game.
BEAT DOWN OF THE WEEK:
#7 Boise State crushes New Mexico 45-0
Boise is 11-1, New Mexico is 1-11. So yeah this was a beat down before they even kicked off. Los Lobos managed only 197 total yards on the day and 8 first downs. By contrast, The Smurf’s QB Kellen Moore went 28/33 for 313 yards and 3 TD
s by himself before he was pulled from the game in the second half. This was also Moore's 49th career win as a starting quarterback, the best in FBS history. He also has 137 career touchdown passes, second best behind Houston's QB C.K. While I’m not a huge fan of BSU, I do think they deserve an at large bid to a BCS Bowl. This is the third straight year that they’ll finish as a one loss team and I think it would be a lot more entertaining to see them than Houston. Which, shouldn’t be a problem now that Houston is also a one loss team. By the way, NM’s logo is waaaay more intimidating than their football team.BIGGEST LOSER:
The BigEast!
Yeah it’s still the BigEast. West Virginia won A SHARE of the conference championship by beating South Florida. The other SHARE goes to Cincinnati who beat UConn. But, West Virginia will go to the conference’s automatic BCS Bowl since they will be the highest ranked team in the conference. (Right now they are 23rd). The Mountaineers will probably play Clemson in the Orange Bowl. And, Cincinnati will probably go play in some crap bowl.
Tune in next week when I talk about the Bowls and let you know which will be worth watching and which ones you can probably skip.
4 comments:
The MAC champ gets to play the Sun Belt champ (Arkansas State) in the GoDaddy.com Bowl. It is a wonderful reward. The second choice from the MAC gets a B1G team in the Little Caesar's Pizza Bowl. Ohio, the championship loser, might end up accepting the third bowl tie-in: the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl.
Apparantly you, like most of America, have been seduced by the excitement that Fox's Gus Johnson brings to the games he calls. I can't stand him. I have absolutely nothing against him personally: He doesn't seem nearly as pretentious as other announcers and is genuinely likeable when not making calls. But when he calls games I get disgusted. I know when exciting plays are made, and a dive for two yards in the middle of the second quarter is not an exciting play. I never liked his calls during the NCAA tournament on CBS. It is almost like he thinks that by yelling with some wierd stacatto gutteral slide at the end, he is the one that is making the play exciting. He is not. Football is a game of lulls and mundane plays (entire games between LSU and Alabama are like this). Incomplete passes are sometimes just incomplete passes; five-yard outs are just five-yard outs. I suppose he does a good job of not saying anything stupid (we can't say that for many others), but other guys I can tune out. I spent Friday and Saturday night wishing Gus Johnson would get out of my fucking head.
Maybe I should collect my thoughts about him and state this all in a more productive manner, but I've been meaning to get this off my chest for a while.
One last thing: Georgia dropping all of those touchdown passes really changed the complexion of the game. LSU plays the rest of the game much differently if they are down by 21 instead of 10.
Concur that if its 21-0 LSU plays a different ball age, but uga is not ready for that stage yet. Hopefully next year. Mich state-wis. was the best game of the day, and I am sad that we have to have LSU alabama in the title game. Kind of ruins the whole darn month for me. Oh well. Thanks for another great year on the blog my friend.
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