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New Year’s Day College Football Bowl Disasters: What Happened?
Eight bowl games, eight blowouts. Why were the biggest of the bowls so bad?
January 2, 2016
New Year’s Day College Football Bowl Disasters. What Happened?
Eight bowl games, eight blowouts. Why the big bowls were so bad.
Follow or die … @PeteFiutak
What the hell was that?!
The bowl season was going along so well. If you bothered to watch the early part of the bowl season, this started to look like something special.
The Baylor running game display vs. North Carolina, Jared Goff bombing away on Air Force, Keenan Reynolds running on Pitt, Leonard Fournette running all over Texas Tech …
This was a fantastic bowl season, and then came the two days that will live in college football bowl infamy.
Technically, depending on where you live, December 31st started out great. Wisconsin hung on for dear life over USC deep into the wee hours East Coast time, and that should’ve set the stage for when the big bands took the stage.
So what went so horribly wrong? How come the eight 12/31-1/1 games ranged from awful to all-timer horrible?
The “Find A Way” teams got exposed.
There’s a reason Iowa fans had to keep defending their team. This was a grinding, try-hard team with a good defense and not a lot of explosion. Northwestern got by with no passing game whatsoever, a good running game, and almost always coming through in key moments. Florida’s offense went into the tank after Will Grier was dismissed, but on defense and a few clutch plays it was able to get to the SEC title game.
All that pluck meant absolutely nothing when those three teams got behind.
When you can’t throw the ball, it makes it hard when the other team is putting up points in bunches. Having a high-octane offense doesn’t ensure a better bowl performance – Oklahoma State vs. Ole Miss in the Sugar – but it helps.
The teams with talent tried.
Michigan State was supposedly fired up, but so was Michael Spinks vs. Mike Tyson. Alabama was, apparently, really, really motivated by last year’s loss to Ohio State in the playoff. Combine that with all the next-level talent, and you get that.
Ole Miss was still ticked about the blowout loss to TCU in last year’s Chick-fil-A Peach, and this time around it had Chad Kelly, Laquon Treadwell, and an angry team loaded with several future NFL starters.
Ohio State finally showed up about a month too late, Tennessee had SEC talent and Northwestern didn’t, and Stanford had Christian McCaffrey working behind an NFL-bound O line. Which led into the other problem …
When it wants to be, the SEC is the best conference in college football, and it’s not even close.
Sorry. I know you hate to hear this America, but it just is. Florida might have been a disaster, but Tennessee, Alabama and Ole Miss won their respective bowl games by a combined score of 131-26. In some of the early bowls, a quarterback-less Texas A&M might have lost, but Mississippi State put 51 on NC State, Auburn ripped Memphis 31-10, and LSU ran over Texas Tech 56-27. The SEC wasn’t as bad as you think last bowl season, and now it’s flexing its muscle.
Oklahoma got hot, and not in a good way, and …
Samaje Perine and Joe Mixon got hurt. It’s sort of not fair to lump the Orange Bowl – or the Fiesta – in with the other duds, since the first half was fantastic. But I was there in Miami – it was really hot, the Oklahoma defense was on the field more and wore down.
The Sooners withered partly because there was no running game in the second half, the hurry-up offense hurried up off the field, and that was it. The Clemson defense had everything to do with that, and the lack of an OU ground attack with the two top backs hurt turned a great game into an uggo. Had the Orange been a little better, the last few days would’ve seemed a little different.
But most of all, the problem was …
Bad freaking luck
Northwestern never had a prayer against Tennessee – that one was coming from ten miles away – but the other matchups were fine. The games just didn’t work out.
Michigan State had the talent, experience and coaching staff to give Alabama a run, and that all flew out the window once Alabama decided it was time to be Alabama.
Iowa’s lines were supposed to be a positive, and they really, really weren’t. The 11 sacks allowed will be what’ll kill Kirk Ferentz when he watches the tape – and that McCaffrey guy, too.
Oklahoma State’s offense was supposed to keep up with Ole Miss in a shootout, and it went bye-bye early.
Florida’s defense was supposed to keep the Michigan offense in check, and didn’t. Florida State had the talent to be far better than it showed against Houston, and it wasn’t there.
Oklahoma vs. Clemson was supposed to be dead even, and it got away from the Sooners in the fourth. Notre Dame vs. Ohio State wasn’t awful, but it certainly wasn’t a classic playoff-like game many thought it would be.
It was a rough 48 hours of sports, but to go bumper sticker, a bad day of watching college football beats a good day of working. Unless you work at watching college football – actually, it was still fun.
