Bowl Notes from The Strip
By Micah Roberts
The Pac 10 has stumbled out of the blocks in the bowl season. After going 5-0 last season in bowl games, the Pac 10 is now 0-2 in their first two bowl games against the non-BCS conference of the Mountain West. Oregon State was whacked by BYU 44-20 in the Las Vegas as underdogs on Tuesday and Utah handled California as an underdog 37-27 in the Poinsetta Bowl Wednesday.
The win for Utah was their ninth bowl win in a row tying them for second all-time with USC from the early John Wayne-led years and just beneath Florida State’s 11 in a row set from 1985-96.
The win also serves notice to the BCS committee who has shunned non-BCS conferences, dismissing their validity in the overall scheme. The pairing of the undefeated teams of TCU and Boise State -- the only two non-BCS conference teams playing in BCS bowl games, should serve notice of what the committee’s agenda is. Let them knock each other around without giving them their due by beating a BCS conference team.
Utah is the original BCS buster knocking off Pittsburgh in the 2005 Fiesta Bowl and routing Alabama in last years Sugar Bowl.
Fortunately for the Pac 10, they don’t have to face any more Mountain West teams. There looked to be an edge coming into the bowls this year after the Pac-10 held a 3-0 head to head edge this season and 7-1 over the last eight.
The Pac-10 has five more teams with a chance to salvage some conference pride starting with the heavily favored USC against Boston College in Saturday’s Emerald Bowl. The Trojans opened as nine-point favorites and have been bet down to seven with many feeling of the two teams, the Eagles are the happier of the two to be playing in the pre-New Years day bowl.
The only Pac 10 underdog of their remaining games is Stanford getting 8 1/2-points from Oklahoma in the Sun Bowl. This game had bounced around from an opener of nine all the way down to 7.5 but the recent failures of the first two Pac 10 representatives have many feeling less about the strength of the conference.
In other Pac 10 games, Arizona still holds on as a one-point favorite against Nebraska in the Holiday Bowl. UCLA, the weakest of the Pac 10 teams, has been bumped to a 5 ½-point favorite over Temple in the Eagle Bank Bowl in Washington D.C.
Oregon has been seen as high as a four-point favorite at some books over Ohio State in the Rose Bowl, but is a consensus 3 1/2-point favorite.
Thus far into the bowl season the underdogs are 4-1 with all four underdogs winning straight up heading into Thursday's Hawaii Bowl with Nevada and SMU. Nevada had been as high as a 16 1/2-point favorite, but has been seen as low as 11 1/2 on game day.
The only other real movement involves two of the BCS bowls where Florida has gone to an 11 1/2-poinit favorite over Cincinnati in the Sugar Bowl. The Bear Cats lost head coach Brian Kelly to Notre Dame following their Big East championship game win giving the appearance to many that there is no captain on the ship.
After seeing the bulk of the early action come on Alabama laying the number all the way up to 5 1/2-points over Texas, it’s been all Long Horn money since, dropping the line to 3 1/2 -- a half-point below what the opener began with. Texas backers have cited Alabama as being too one dimensional on offense to hang with a balanced attack of Texas as reasons for the support.