Happy Holidays

What’s up with the Pac-10?  Last year we were unbeaten in bowl season, this year, YEESH.  Oregon State got whooped by BYU, now last night Utah took control of Cal by halftime and ended up with a 37-27 win.  As Teddy Miller said, “uh-oh, Pac-10”.  Yes, we’re now 0-2 this postseason, both losses by double-digits to, you guessed it, the Mountain West. 

I believe the Oregon State thing wasn’t too hard to call if you want to know the truth.  You go from playing in the Civil War for the right to go to Pasadena as Pac-10 champions, suffer a major emotional loss to your hated rival in a wonderful game, then have to get excited to play BYU in the Vegas Bowl??  They came down with a severe case of “didn’t-want-to-be-there-itis”.  We’ve seen that happen too many times in the bowl season, where one team is clearly more excited than the other about the game itself.  But BYU is pretty good too, and we don’t want to take too much away from that win.  Nobody beat up the Beavs this year like BYU did on Tuesday.

But I thought Cal would have played better than they did, even though they finished with a 2-3 record down the stretch without Jahvid Best.  I thought after their thumping in Seattle that they would regroup with a passion and put it all together, and it looked promising early, but Utah looked awfully good.  I don’t think you’ll get many arguments as to who was the better football team last night.

This is probably more for a post on another day, but maybe it’s time to just accept the fact that the playing field is, quite frankly, as level as it’s EVER been?  I know there’s a lot of Pac-10 expansion talk in the last few weeks, and there are so many layers to that discussion in and of itself that we will save that for another day.  And we have a built-in arrogance being in the Pac-10/BCS power conference, and we look down a bit at the second-tier (yes, we even do that at WSU).  But really, if I’m Utah or BYU, two teams that are likely on the expansion radar, why would I feel the need to jump to the Pac-10?  The money is nice, but what exactly do I have to gain if I’m in their shoes? 

And, I will say this – from a WSU perspective, after watching BYU and Utah the last few nights, is there ANY shame in getting recruits who also had MWC or WAC teams on their list?  I know a lot was made in the last few years that WSU wasn’t getting recruits against other BCS schools.  But now I look and think hey, if a player had a BYU or Utah or Boise State or TCU on their list and they still chose WSU, uh, that’s actually NOT a bad thing anymore.

Maybe the answer is just to scrap the BCS as we know it, and have conferences like the MWC and the WAC treated the same as the BCS schools?  Maybe, I don’t know, throw it open to a playoff and see what happens?  NEVER heard that argument before!  🙂  But the days of the MWC or the WAC not being able to compete with BCS level teams are long, long gone, and I think it’s pretty clear they aren’t coming back!

All for now.  Enjoy your x-mas eve, and as always, GO COUGS!