e of you who think you learned anything watching Ohio State sleepwalk against Ohio University, you need to re-evaluate for college football watching skills. And please keep in mind that this Ohio State team can be very ugly at times. Please see eg., Ohio State v. Akron U., 9/08/2007 and Ohio State@ Washington, 9/15/2007. The Buckeyes rebounded in the 3rd quarter of those games, as opposed to the 4th quarter last week, but still only had three points in the first halves of both of those games.Miami @ Florida was actually a pleasant surprise with Florida up by just 6 points with 13:25 left in the 4th quarter. On the next play Percy Harvin zoomed around and into the end zone for a two yard touchdown behind the effort of some pretty amazing and absolutely crucial blocks. Game over after that. And even though Tim Tebow was not the main factor in that play, which was possibly the most critical play of the game, he did obviously have a significant role in the game with over 300 all-purpose yards and 2 touchdowns. But, seriously, Musburger, did you really have to call Florida "the Tebows?"
West Virginia @ East Carolina. Was anyone really shocked about this one? Yes, it's a great win. It's just that it wasn't completely inconceivable. I think 2007 may have numbed many of us to the idea of unranked teams defeating ranked opponents. And for those of you calling EC
U this year's Hawaii, that's such a meaningless term and really the equivalent of calling them this year's BCS-Impostor (i.e., a team that could go undefeated, yet un-proven and end up in a BCS Bowl game where they will be exposed for the non-BCS team that they truly are). Let's review the 2007 Hawaii team for a moment. Hawaii beat not three, not two, but just one ranked team. That would be Boise State. And just how good was that 19th-ranked-Boise State team (that would eventually end the season unranked)? Well, they didn't beat a single ranked opponent all year and they only entered the top-25 in November after waiting around for all of the ranked teams to kill each other off. And for what it's worth, Boise State finished the year with a loss to East Carolina in the Sheraton Hawaii Bowl Game (I won't even comment on that ridiculous name for now). But if you're going to give credit to Hawaii for beating Boise, then I suppose credit must also be given to ECU since the Broncos were actually ranked 24th at the time. ECU has now beaten two more ranked opponents back-to-back (#17 Virginia Tech and #8 West Virginia) and is reminding me of their 1999 squad, but better. Can't we just call them this year's BCS-Wildcard? I find that much less insulting.
1 comment:
I would say that ECU is more on par with the Boise State team that beat Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl or at the very least, South Florida at the beginning of 2007. I do believe we learned that Ohio State is far from the level they need to be to beat USC at home. Finally, we learned that pre-season polls do more harm than good since virtually none of them ranked ECU, now 14th, and in beating #8 and #17 most "so-called experts" have severely overrated teams by name recognition alone. 1TIME1TIME@ESPN
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