All good things must come to an end, and with Week 14 in college football behind us, we have reached the end of college football’s regular season. True, the Army-Navy game is next weekend, but this was the last full weekend of college football in the 2012 season. It’ll be weird to have a Saturday without football. Seems like just yesterday South Carolina and Vanderbilt were playing to open the year…
And with that, here’s our last Winners and Losers.
Winners: Alabama, Wisconsin, Kansas State
I could have picked any of the teams that punched their stamps to BCS bowl games as winners this week; after all, that is the goal of all of the 124 FBS teams. But it is the way that each of this teams did so that makes them this week’s winners. This year’s SEC Championship Game was one for the ages, as #2 Alabama edged #3 Georgia, 32-28. It came down to one play, one final play. A deflection…a reception…no timeouts…the clock ticks down to zero. Alabama wins, and will play Notre Dame in the national championship game. Hey, at least Georgia now knows how Florida feels. But while the SEC Championship was a close, edge-of-your-seat matchup, the B1G Championship Game was…everything but, as Wisconsin destroyed #12 Nebraska, 70-31. Seventy points. This tweet really says it all:
RT if you scored a touchdown on the Nebraska defense tonight.
— Faux John Madden (@FauxJohnMadden) December 2, 2012
With the victory, Wisconsin goes to her third consecutive Rose Bowl.
And congrats to #6 Kansas State, who, with their 42-24 win over #18 Texas, won a share of the Big 12 Championship, and, based on a head-to-head victory over Oklahoma, will represent the conference in the Fiesta Bowl. Bill Synder has taken this program to the mountaintop, and any praise he receives is not nearly enough.
Losers: Georgia, Nebraska, USF, the fans
Georgia was only yards away from the BCS National Championship Game, and were he successful, the game-winning drive would have secured Aaron Murray’s legacy as one of the Georgia greats. Instead, clock-mismanagement and a deflected pass doomed Georgia’s national title hopes. And they won’t even get the Sugar Bowl as consolation, as Florida will surely pass them in the BCS standings. But at least Georgia was close. Nebraska lost by almost forty points. In addition to losing an shot at the Rose Bowl, they will probably face the aforementioned Georgia team in the Capital One Bowl. Yikes.
And USF…oh USF.
This bit from USF blog Voodoo Five says it all:
Fans near the broadcast booth could be heard yelling at the coaches as the game predictably went sour.
Then Holtz sent the field-goal unit out on 4th and goal with the Bulls trailing 27-0 in the fourth quarter.
Honesty, at that moment USF should have felt lucky that they aren’t a tradition-laden program that sells out every game no matter what, because it might have been Thunderdome time. The people who were there went berserk. There was about as loud of booing as you can get out of a crowd of 18,000 people. ESPN2 showed three different reaction shots of fans screaming obscenities and booing and putting their arms out in complete disbelief. Maikon Bonani hit a 26-yarder to cut the lead to 27-3.
Pitt would drain the remaining nine+ minutes off the clock on its final drive, and could have scored again of they chose. Instead, they took a knee on the Bulls three-yard line and clinched bowl eligibility with a 27-3 win.
Less than twenty-fours later, and with a 2-14 record in the Big East over the past two seasons, the Skip Holtz era came to an inglorious end:
Skip Holtz fired after 3 seasons at USF, sources told @espn
— Brett McMurphy (@McMurphyESPN) December 2, 2012
The long rebuilding process has begun.
But the biggest loser this week is the fans. With week 14 in the books, there is no regular season college football left. The bowls are still to be played, but the anticipation of fall, the rivalry games…all over. The sport is all too short.
Tonight, the bowls are announced. Will NIU bust the BCS? Looking at the Coaches Poll, it’ll be awfully close.
Coaches Poll
| Rank | Team | Record | Points | First Place Votes | Previous Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |
Notre Dame |
12-0 | 1470 | 56 | 1 |
| 2 |
Alabama |
12-1 | 1417 | 3 | 2 |
| 3 |
Oregon |
11-1 | 1313 | 0 | 4 |
| 4 |
Florida |
11-1 | 1287 | 0 | 5 |
| 5 |
Georgia |
11-2 | 1216 | 0 | 3 |
| 6 |
Kansas St. |
11-1 | 1190 | 0 | 7 |
| 7 |
LSU |
10-2 | 1111 | 0 | 6 |
| 8 |
Stanford |
11-2 | 1047 | 0 | 9 |
| 9 |
Texas A&M |
10-2 | 1039 | 0 | 8 |
| 10 |
South Carolina |
10-2 | 947 | 0 | 10 |
| 11 |
Oklahoma |
10-2 | 890 | 0 | 11 |
| 12 |
Florida St. |
11-2 | 853 | 0 | 12 |
| 13 |
Clemson |
10-2 | 769 | 0 | 14 |
| 14 |
Oregon St. |
9-3 | 663 | 0 | 17 |
| 15 |
Boise St. |
10-2 | 569 | 0 | 15 |
| 16 |
Northern Illinois |
12-1 | 495 | 0 | 18 |
| 17 |
Northwestern |
9-3 | 444 | 0 | 20 |
| 18 |
Louisville |
10-2 | 409 | 0 | 23 |
| 19 |
UCLA |
9-4 | 408 | 0 | 16 |
| 20 |
Utah State |
10-2 | 334 | 0 | 22 |
| 21 |
Nebraska |
10-3 | 328 | 0 | 13 |
| 22 |
Michigan |
8-4 | 278 | 0 | 24 |
| 23 |
Wisconsin |
8-5 | 115 | 0 | NR |
| 24 |
San Jose St. |
10-2 | 110 | 0 | NR |
| 25 |
Texas |
8-4 | 97 | 0 | 21 |
Multi-Purpose Stadium 