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Wildcat Sports => Football => Topic started by: cf0102 on December 06, 2011, 09:33:07 PM
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http://insider.espn.go.com/college-football/blog/_/name/mcgee_ncf_ryan/id/7323408/which-bowls-ended-landing-best-matchups-cfb
Winner: AT&T Cotton Bowl
I have long maintained that the Cotton Bowl looks, feels and should indeed be a BCS bowl. No one provides a bigger prime-time stage, no one has a nicer facility, and no one does a better job of piecing together great matchups.
This year, the Jerry Dome will host the Kansas State Wildcats, who were jobbed out of a Sugar Bowl berth, and the Arkansas Razorbacks, whose only two losses came to the top two teams in the land.
Loser: Sugar Bowl
I am a big believer in the history of the Michigan Wolverines and the track record of the Virginia Tech Hokies. I think that Denard Robinson and David Wilson are on the short list of the most purely talented football players in the nation. But passing on the higher-ranked Boise State Broncos and Kansas State Wildcats, or even the Baylor Bears, merely serves as a giant highlighter marker for those who think the BCS is more about raking in fan cash than providing the best matchups on the field.
As the bowl selections were announced Sunday night, the Sugar Bowl was the No. 2 trending topic on Twitter. That was not a compliment.
Loser: Big 12
The Big 12 had eight of its 10 schools make bowls and basically no one got what it wanted. The Oklahoma State Cowboys missed the championship game and Kansas State and Baylor were bypassed by the BCS. The Oklahoma Sooners, the preseason No. 1, is in the Insight Bowl to play Iowa.
And fans of the Missouri Tigers are blaming dirty conference politics for their fall to the bottom rung of the Big 12 bowl barrel, the Independence Bowl, which put them even lower than the 6-6 Iowa State Cyclones. Iowa State is headed to the Bronx to play the Rutgers Scarlet Knights in the Pinstripe Bowl.
So the conference that was considered by many to be the second best in the nation behind the SEC ended up with one BCS team while the ACC had two? What in the wide, wide world of Dan Beebe is going on here?
Winner: Jan. 2 bowls
Once those traditional New Year's Day games finally are played on Monday, Jan. 2 (Jan. 1 falls on a Sunday, and that's the NFL's territory, no matter how un-American it may feel to have no college football on New Year's Day), nearly every matchup is a good one from the Big Ten versus SEC matchups to the crazy-good Rose and Fiesta showdowns. Even the new kid on the block, the TicketCity Bowl that's played in the old Cotton Bowl and in the old Cotton Bowl's traditional time slot of noon ET, features Houston versus the Penn State Nittany Lions.
Both those teams thought they'd be playing somewhere else, but their travails ended up becoming a coup for a game that is holding just its second edition.