But you can be sure that any aerial shot of the Rose Bowl on January 1 will look like a bumblebee swarm. Not ever. To do it this season, with freshman quarterback Clayton Thorson, sophomore running back Justin Jackson and a defense that plays with a tenacity near and dear to the heart of coach Pat Fitzgerald, would rate as a remarkable achievement.
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Iowa’s only loss came to Michigan State, 16-13, after the Spartans’ scored the game-winning touchdown with 27 seconds left in the Big Ten Championship game.
Still, Pasadena is a precious consolation prize. Saban is hoping that unlike previous year, the Tide rolls instead of loses as it did to Ohio State in 2014. This will mark the seventh appearance for Ohio State in the Fiesta Bowl and the ninth appearance by a Big Ten team. Each team lost once.
Michigan State needed a miracle.
Top-ranked Clemson, Alabama, Stanford and Michigan State took the wins in the major conferences.
Get ready to watch Big Game Bob celebrate college football’s biggest team prize. With a few exceptions, the right pinballs fell in the right slots, and logic was served. No. 1 Clemson vs. No. 4 Oklahoma starts at 4 p.m. on December 31 in the Orange Bowl; and No. 2 Alabama vs. No. 3 Michigan State starts at 8 p.m. on December 31 in the Cotton Bowl. The seeding is right, too.
Like many of Saban’s former assistants who have gone on to become head coaches – such as McElwain, Florida State’s Jimbo Fisher, and new Georgia and SC coaches Kirby Smart and Will Muschamp – Dantonio credits Saban with helping his career reach its current place.
Each year is different.
Longtime readers will recall that I used to be in the anti-playoff camp over concerns about damaging the value of the regular season, uneasiness about forcing non-paid athletes (many of whom are legitimate students) to play 15 games and the concern that a four-team playoff would make fans thirst for an eight-teamer.
“Mark has done a fabulous job”, Saban said, “and I got to see that 22-play drive, and it was pretty awesome”. This new system put football experts into a room Sunday morning after Saturday’s conference playoff games and allowed them to sift through a variety of criteria and argue the relative merits of teams.
But nobody could logically displace Oklahoma.
Michigan State defeated No. 5 Iowa, No. 7 Ohio State, No. 14 Michigan and No. 14 OR, with the two of those wins on the road. Stanford might have had an argument had it not laid such a large egg at Northwestern, then lost at home to Oregon.
The fake field goal in overtime against Notre Dame in 2010. It means that, somebody might get screwed, but in most years, nobody will get ROYALLY screwed-if four teams end up ahead of you, then you probably messed up somewhere along the way. It already is, really. Michigan State basketball is ranked No. 1 in the latest AP poll, which came out Monday. He was confident that other conferences would follow.
“We were expecting to be in”, center Ty Darlington said, “but you never know until the last moment, so it was great to see the matchup on the screen”.
The next time someone howls about the need for an eight-team playoff, remember this season. The committee releases the matchups for the inaugural playoffs and for the other bowl games.
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The message is clear: Make it to your conference championship game. And it would do nothing to defuse controversy – No. 17 would still have a major problem. Both teams were ranked earlier this season. It traveled to a hard venue, in this case Tennessee, and won. “They beat us bad just a year ago”.
