Opinion: 5 Thoughts On The 2014 New Year’s Six Bowl Games & College Football Playoff Selections

The votes have been cast and the match-ups for the New Year’s Six Bowl Games, including the two national semi-final contests – the Rose Bowl Game in Pasadena and the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans – have been set and finalised amid the expected amount of controversy.

Here are my five overriding thoughts in the wake of the announcement of the first ever College Football Playoff bracket:

1. Alabama deserved their ranking: They’ve been the best team in the nation for most of the year, and despite Oregon’s demolition job of Arizona in the Pac-12 Championship Game, the Tide’s similarly comfortable win over Missouri in the SEC Championship kept them atop the rankings, and sets up a pretty interesting Nick Saban vs. Urban Meyer Sugar Bowl match-up!

More importantly than that, for everyone who’s mouth waters at the prospect of the Oregon offense vs. the Alabama defense – and, let’s be honest, that’s pretty much everyone who loves college football – it puts the Tide on a collision course with the Ducks in the National Championship game I think everyone outside of Tallahassee and Columbus wants to see.

2. Ohio State Need To Be Very Good against Alabama: Putting the Buckeyes in the final four, on the strength of their admittedly-impressive Big Ten Championship performance, is a risky move on the playoff committee’s behalf.

I’ll tell you now, if the Buckeyes absolutely stink it up against the Crimson Tide in New Orleans, there’ll be even more controversy than there already is over the inclusion of Urban Meyer’s team.

If the Buckeyes don’t play against the Tide – well, to a certain extent anyway, because that Alabama defense is going to make life difficult – there’ll be a backlash like no other. With Baylor and/or TCU, we knew what we were going to get. The Buckeyes are serious Wild Cars. Saban should be a little wary. So should Ohio State fans. I mean, Cardale Jones was the third-string quarterback for a reason. If he tosses a few bad interceptions, watch the uproar out of Waco and Fort Worth.

3. No Outright Big XII Champion Cost Baylor & TCU a Final Four spot: The problem, herein, is the idea of a co-conference champion. Despite the Bears beating the Horned Frogs in their head-to-head game earlier this year, the two couldn’t be separated by their own conference and, therefore, are the first pair of teams on the outside looking in.

The Big XII has previously stated that they’re okay with awarding the conference championship to two schools, I’ve got a feeling they’ll be changing their tune after seeing Baylor and TCU, either of whom would surely have jumped ahead of the Buckeyes and in that fourth spot, had they been the winners of a conference championship game.

Or, at the very least, declared outright conference champions. Baylor coach Art Briles apparently said as much – angrily, if you believe the reports – when he confronted Big XII commissioner Bob Bowlsby after Baylor’s Saturday night victory over Kansas State.

If Baylor had been made outright Big XII champions by virtue of their earlier win over TCU, then Ohio State would likely be on the outer, and there’d be a tonne less controversy than exists now.  The other option, of course, is to bring in two more teams and be able to stage a conference championship. That worked for Ohio State, didn’t it?

4. Boise State Have a Real Chance at a Fiesta Bowl title: Don’t sleep on the Broncos, who are 2-0 in Fiesta Bowl games all-time, including the memorable win over the Oklahoma Sooners in 2007.

Yes, the 2014 iteration of the high-octane Broncos managed a paltry 21 points offensively against Fresno State – the other seven were courtesy of an interception return by Tanner Vallejo – in the Mountain West Conference, but we saw in that game the emergence of their defense.

As good as the Broncos have shown themselves to be on the offensive side of the football, I doubt they’ll endure two bad games. So, Grant Hedrick will be back to his best passing the football, and considering how well he used his feet on Saturday, he’s likely to give the Wildcat defense, shredded by Oregon on Friday night, fits. Then there’s the BSU defense which is seriously underrated and might just decide to use the national platform on New Year’s Eve to show us all how good they can be.

5. Whatever happens, The Rose Bowl Game will be intriguing: Sure, it isn’t the traditional Big Ten/Pac-12(10) match-up that the Rose Bowl Game committee so covets, but Jameis Winston vs. Marcus Mariota on New Year’s Day in the Granddaddy Of Them All promises to be nothing short of spectacular.

It may very well be a quarterback battle between last year’s Heisman Trophy winner and this year’s. One thing is for sure, both teams, on their day, can score points like it’s going out of fashion. We’ve seen a few wide-open Rose Bowl Games in recent years, and this might be another.

The flip side is this: Oregon, in the past, has been susceptible to being shut down offensively by good defensive teams when given ample weeks to prepare. Ohio State got them in the Rose Bowl a few years back, and Auburn did something similar in the National Championship Game more recently, too.

At the same time, defending National Champions Florida State have had far from an ideal season. They’ve had well-documented troubles in recent games, requiring a four-quarter effort to get past a plucky Georgia Tech in the ACC Championship. In fact, they’ve made winning late and scrappily an art this year.

If FSU aren’t on their game, Marcus Mariota and the Ducks are likely to blow them away. The ‘Noles will sweat on the outcome of a Jameis Winston student code of conduct hearing, though the cynic in me suggests that the outcome won’t be known until after football season.

The Rose Bowl Game won’t be one to miss!

Talking Points: 2014 Rose Bowl Game

Originally posted at The Roar

A few thoughts in the wake of No. 4 Michigan State's victory 24-20 victory over No. 5 Stanford in the 100th Rose Bowl Game.

I saw the 100th Rose Bowl Game like this: Stanford were beaten at their own game by a ferocious Michigan State team, whose defense came up trumps on a number of crucial occasions to deliver the signature win the Spartans have been waiting and hoping for since Mark Dantonio took over as coach.

Sparty’s first Rose Bowl title in 26 long years will be remembered for a long time, and Athletic Director Mark Hollis, an innovator who conceived the idea of basketball on an aircraft carrier, looks like an out-and-out genius for signing Dantonio to a multi-year extension just before the game. 

September wasn’t good for the Spartans. Quarterback Connor Cook didn’t even start the season as starter. October was better. In November, this team started to flex its muscles, and it was about that time when you figured if anyone could beat undefeated Ohio State, it was Michigan State. 

Their defense was ironclad, a bunch of big guys up front who could fill a hole and tackle you for a loss, and a secondary who nicknamed themselves the ‘No Fly Zone’ because opposing quarterbacks discovered a graveyard down there when they put the football up.
December brought about the team’s defining moment – well, defining moment before their heroics in Pasadena.

Dantonio’s men beat Ohio State, handing Urban Meyer his first loss in two seasons in the Big Ten Championship Game, and it was the Spartans headed for the Granddaddy of them all, doing to the Buckeyes what they’d done to teams all season: stifling them offensively to within an inch of their collective lives.

What to say about Stanford? Well, their defense wasn’t as good on New Year’s Day as it has been for most of the rest of the season.Shayne Skov was a force in the middle, as you’d expect, but he didn’t have enough help.It’s ironic that much of the pregame talk focused on how Michigan State would miss their suspended star linebacker Max Bullough. Well, you wouldn’t have known it, the way the Spartan defense played. Instead, it looked like the Cardinal were missing their big star.

Offensively, Stanford just didn’t do enough. True, they looked dynamite in the first quarter, but that was as good as it got, a false dawn, for the Cardinal. Their offense didn’t score another point all game. Only Kevin Anderson’s 40-yard interception return for a touchdown off of an errant Connor Cook throw made the game as close as it was. Hard-nosed running back Tyler Gaffney, a pounder of defenses all year – ask Oregon – managed a meagre 24 yards after quarter time, and 91 for the game. Nothing doing, as they say. The Spartan front was dominant. Play-calling from Stanford’s David Shaw… less than dominant.

Conversely, Michigan State looked dangerous every time they had the football, and had at least a modicum of success each drive, moving the ball mostly through the air, with Cook throwing for 332 yards and two huge touchdowns, choosing the Rose Bowl to play the best game of his career after another strong showing in the Big Ten Championship Game against Ohio State.

The last play, a fourth down and one near midfield for Stanford, was emblematic of the performance of MSU’s defense, which gave up only 159 yards over the final three quarters after being run through early. It was former walk-on (and the man who replaced Bullough in the centre of the defense) Kyler Elsworth, jumping over the pile to stuff Stanford’s Ryan Hewitt with less than 2:00 to play. 

It was an all-in team effort on the day and all season. No one player was bigger than the team. Pat Narduzzi’s men were disciplined all season and all game, which ultimately delivered the biggest prize in Big Ten football.

For as long as I’ve been paying attention to college football, Michigan State has been good. They’re always there or thereabouts in the Big Ten title race, and somewhat nationally relevant, but 2013 will be remembered for being the year where they became great, and that season of improvement and change was perfectly capped off in the shadows of the San Gabriel Mountains on the first day of January 2014.