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CFN's Instant Analysis of Florida's 51-24 win over Cincinnati
in the Allstate Sugar Bowl.
With the pressure off, Gators rock and roll
I want a redo.
Get those traders back in here. Turn those machines back on.
I want to see Florida play Alabama again with this team. The team
that played with an attitude and a bounce in its step. The team
that played with all the pressure off. The team that didn’t
have to worry about legacies, history, and the weight of the world.
Cincinnati wasn’t the same team that blew through the
regular season and was so impressive in its historic season, but it
also ran into a buzzsaw. Florida appeared to actually have real,
live fun, and it showed.
In this joyless of successful seasons with Tim Tebow’s
concussion, Urban Meyer’s health, struggles to get wins in
games that were expected to be 40-point blowouts, and again, all
the pressure, it was as if Florida was fighting itself. There was
no us-against-the-world thing like the 2006 national title team
had, and there wasn’t the angry motivation that last
year’s team had. Now, with the national title out of the
picture, it was like the team took a deep exhale and went out and
just played while showing the talent level that should’ve
been enough for a trip to Pasadena.
Let this be a lesson to future powerhouse teams and program.
The pressure is always going to be unbearable at times at places
like Alabama, USC, Ohio State, and other regular power programs,
but along the way, the more the team is able to play loose and do
what it’s supposed to do, the better it’s probably
going to play. And the same goes for the players.
Beyond all the BS, the lovefest from the Gator nation, and
the sickening cheering at the postgame press conference after Meyer
read off Tebow's stats and résumé, it's time to end the
discussion no matter what you think about the guy (and this is
coming from someone who can't stand the periphery stuff): Tebow
finished his career as a special, special player and the greatest
college quarterback of all time.
Talk about the pressure being off. He didn't have to carry
his team to a national title, he didn't have to worry about the
Heisman, and he didn't have to worry about anything other than
going out and having fun in the final game of his career. What did
that translate to? 31-of-35, 482 yards, three touchdowns, and 14
runs for 51 yards and one score. That's the Tebow I wanted to see
against Alabama and this was the Florida that should've showed up a
month ago.
— Pete Fiutak
Mountain West must love Big East's flop
Ahhh, to be a fly on the wall of the Mountain West Conference
offices right about now.
What must anyone associated with the league be thinking at
this very moment? Surely, everyone from commissioner Craig Thompson
down to the New Mexico long snapper had to be watching this Sugar
Bowl disaster with a high level of curiosity. You mean, this is the
best that the Big East has to offer? The same Big East that has an
automatic berth in the BCS, while the Mountain West must jump
through a few extra hoops for its invitation? Like it or not, these
two conferences will continue to be tied at the hip, waging a
mythical battle in the court of public opinion to determine which
is more deserving of a coveted January bowl game. For Thompson,
this postseason could not have started much better. The Mountain
West, with headliner TCU still left to play in the Fiesta Bowl, is
4-0 and the Big East just witnessed the public beatdown of its
champion to Florida. That whoosh you just heard is a sea change
that’s been cresting in Thompson’s favor for some time.
Now, few outside the Queen City expected the Bearcats to be
this year’s Utah in New Orleans, but their horrid performance
was reminiscent of Hawaii’s two years ago. That was
unexpected. Sure, they didn’t have their head coach or a
defense to match up with Florida, but this was an unbeaten team
that failed to even remain competitive past the first few series.
Honest, had they been wearing the colors of Western Carolina or
Chattanooga, would you have known the difference? It was that
lopsided from start to finish…which raises one more chilling
question. How close were we to seeing this overrated Cincinnati
team playing in Pasadena for a national championship next Thursday
night?
Thank you, Hunter Lawrence. Had the Texas placekicker not
kicked the clutch game-winner to fend off Nebraska in the Big 12
championship game, we could very well have had Alabama vs.
Cincinnati in the national title game. After being subjected to
watching the Bearcats get ambushed by the SEC runner-up, I shudder
to think how they might have fared versus the SEC champs with a
whole lot more riding on the outcome.
— Richard Cirminilo
Don't judge Bearcats by this game
1. Much as Oregon State and Oregon (to give just a few
prominent examples) produced terrific regular seasons only to
face-plant in their bowl games, Cincinnati fell apart on a big
stage after doing so much good work from September through early
December. Casual football fans who tuned into the Sugar Bowl surely
thought, “Geez! This Cincinnati team is a joke! What an
embarrassment!” If you hadn’t watched the Bearcats over
the course of a full season, you couldn’t be blamed for
thinking as much.
But let’s step back and look at Cincinnati in a larger
context. Much as it would be horrible to treat Oregon State or
Oregon as punching bags based on one awful bowl performance, it
would be similarly severe to label Cincinnati as a second-rate
program based on one train wreck in the Big Easy.
First, Brian Kelly’s absence was going to matter a
great deal, and anyone who believed (or tried to believe) otherwise
was just wishing and hoping for an unattainable result in New
Orleans. Second, when Urban Meyer displayed his vulnerability to
his team and to the nation, the Gators — perhaps inclined to
go through the motions when the enormity of the loss to Alabama set
in — gained fresh motivation for this contest. Considering
how poorly Florida performed in the SEC championship game, the
emergence of an incentive — namely, giving Meyer a
stress-free evening — figured to make the Gators one very
focused team in the Louisiana Superdome. In so many ways, this game
set up poorly for Cincinnati. It was going to be hard for the
Bearcats to match a motivated Florida club that was ready to run
through a brick wall for both Meyer and this other guy named Tebow,
whom you might have heard of a few times on the FOX broadcast.
Cincinnati — not West Virginia, not a loaded Pittsburgh
program, and not Rutgers, with all that New Jersey-area high school
talent — has won the Big East in each of the past two
seasons. Cincinnati — not South Florida and not 2006 Big East
champion Louisville — has reached a BCS bowl in each of the
past two years. Cincinnati — along with a few other clubs
— went unbeaten in 2009 and did some heavy lifting to get to
12-0. Perhaps Butch Jones won’t be able to sustain Brian
Kelly’s magic in 2010 and beyond, but this is a program that
has overachieved in recent seasons. Once again, reserve your fire
and your disappointment for the likes of Michigan State, UCLA,
North Carolina State, and Illinois.
2. In the 2001 season, the only reason Nebraska entered the
BCS national title game — and got summarily throttled by
Miami — was that TCU beat Southern Miss, 14-12, in a decisive
game that moved the decimal points to the Huskers’ column.
Here we are, eight long seasons later, and if Jerry Jones had not
installed an above-ground railing at his new pleasure palace in
suburban Dallas, the Cincinnati Bearcats would have been in the
national title game against Alabama. It’s not as though
Cincinnati wouldn’t have deserved its place in the ultimate
showdown against the Crimson Tide; in the three-team derby
involving UC, Texas and TCU, no squad had an airtight case, meaning
that an argument could have been made for the Big East champions.
The point of mentioning the connections between 2001 and 2009 is
that the amount of variables in college football is far more than
the current BCS setup can handle. Only one scenario — two and
only two unbeaten teams — provides both clarity and a true,
non-mythical national champion. Anything else results in unanswered
questions, questions that can only be addressed by one thing: more
games.
Do we need a playoff? Let’s not think we have to have
one. What college football does need, however, is some kind of
setup which can provide a greater quantity of defining
non-conference games during the season. If, for instance, all the
major conference champions (including the Mountain West and Boise
State) could play each other on the first Saturday of December in
made-for-TV regular-season games, a playoff wouldn’t be
necessary. A set of bowl games — following a those
early-December duels — would settle the arguments that
college football normally fails to resolve in a given season.
Perhaps there would be just one or two debates left after the BCS
bowls, but that’s when a plus-one — and mind you, a
PROVISIONAL plus-one (who said it has to be etched in stone
regardless of other outcomes?) — could be used to determine a
clear-cut champion… if necessary.
The bottom line on this Florida-Cincinnati game is that it
exposed the Bearcats as not ready for prime time. Football fans and
writers — who want to see how various teams measure up
against each other — could have gained this insight much
earlier.
If we had a system that created more high-quality
non-conference showdowns during the regular season, Cincy-Florida
would have been a regular-season prelude to a Sugar Bowl between
Florida and TCU, with the winner having a chance to advance to a
plus-one championship game against Texas, Alabama or Boise State.
Give thanks for a railing at Cowboys Stadium. It saved
Americans from an ugly BCS title tilt. Yet, the very tenuousness
and fragility of this whole situation only serves to remind us how
comically inadequate the BCS system has always been, a massive
stain on the college football scene since its inception in 1998.
— Matt Zemek
