Five teams ripe for bowl letdowns
December 26, 2007
Steve Greenberg
I am writing today from the depths of a holiday food coma that is so severely morbid I fear I may never think clearly again. The effort that went into that sentence alone damn near killed me.
But -- taking a page from the East Carolina Pirates -- I shall soldier on through this adversity and try to get to a point.
I am thinking of one of the two uniquely terrible qualities of college football's postseason, the other being the absence of a playoff to determine a champion. The one I am thinking of, however, is, in a practical sense, far worse and far more annoying. And it is the preponderance of postseason teams -- bowl teams -- that simply do not emotionally invest in their final games.
Case in point: Boise State, which lost to inferior East Carolina in the Hawaii Bowl after snoozing through the first half and waking up for a furious second-half comeback.
Sadly, there probably are a half-dozen or more examples every year of bowl teams that fail to ramp things back up after their pre-bowl breaks. Boise State already is guilty, and don't even try to tell me I'm wrong about that one. The question now is: Who else will fall into this trap?
At bowls time, it isn't always about who wants it more. It's often about who wants it less. As Barry Alvarez -- who was a great bowl-prep coach at Wisconsin -- once told me, one unfocused, holiday binge-eating player can spread the sickness to 10 players in a single practice. A coach's biggest job in December isn't X-ing and O-ing; it's making sure his players don't shut down the season one game early.
So I'm thinking about the Ohio State Buckeyes, who have more motivation than anybody this season, not only because they'll play for the national championship but also because they completely forgot what time it was a year ago. I don't know if the Buckeyes will be good enough to beat LSU, but I'm positive they'll show up with their A-game.
And if the Tigers -- or just a handful of them -- eat too much and laze about, or even just lose their pinpoint focus for a week, they will lose.
So back to that question: Who else will fall into the trap? Five prime candidates to lose track of the time and lose to an inferior opponent:
1. Purdue. Yes, the team that plays Wednesday night (7:30 ET, ESPN) against 8-point underdog Central Michigan in the Motor City Bowl. The Boilermakers usually beat the teams they should beat (and lose to everybody else), but how can they look at the 2007 season as anything but a massive disappointment? Joe Tiller's team returned basically everybody from the 2006 squad and still played uninspired ball when it counted. Meanwhile, CMU is chomping at the bit. I smell an upset.
2. California. No team in all of college football showed less heart this season than the Bears. They are better than Air Force (Armed Forces Bowl, Dec. 31) at every spot on the field, but it might not matter -- the Falcons actually care about winning.
3. Florida. I can't believe I'm including the Gators, who play punch-line Michigan (Capital One, Jan. 1) in Wolverines coach Lloyd Carr's swan song. But as the off days dragged on, I started to wonder what those film sessions were like for the Gators, assuming they looked at their three losses. I know this about Carr: He is the same guy with his team seven days a week. But those losses all but wrecked the super-intense Urban Meyer, and I've got to think he has transferred a lot of that tension onto the Gators' shoulders. If Michigan can keep it close in the first half, we could be looking at what most fans would consider a major shocker.
4. Missouri. It's always dangerous to play a team that wants to send a message on behalf of its beleaguered coaching staff, and that's exactly what Arkansas (Cotton, Jan. 1) aims to do. But it's especially dangerous for a team coming off a loss in its biggest game in decades, as Mizzou is. The Tigers feel they were robbed of a BCS at-large berth, but that sting wore off already. Can they gear it all the way up again? I doubt it.
5. LSU. The Tigers are more talented than the Buckeyes, and they've played in more big games this season. But they had such a roller coaster of a season that I wonder if they can fully light the fire yet again. I mean, let's face it -- they closed the season poorly against Arkansas and Tennessee. Maybe it was a sign that they'd pretty much run out of steam. If the Buckeyes are leading at halftime of the BCS title game, it'll be a sure sign the Tigers have no comeback left in them.
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