The Annual IBCR SEC Bowl Slate Viewers Guide

With a 6:40 kickoff at the Music City Bowl in Nashville, the SEC’s nine bowl teams begin postseason play. Here’s a rundown of the matchups with kickoff times and what to look for in each.

MUSIC CITY – Friday, Dec 30, 6:40 ESPN, Mississippi State vs. Wake Forest. Dan Mullen’s Bulldogs were picked to make some noise in the SEC West this year, but slipped to a 6-6 overall record and a disappointing 2-6 in SEC play. Wake Forest is a middling ACC team that also comes in with a 6-6 record. State is favored by 7 but their more physical style of play could be a real problem for the Demon Deacons.

LIBERTY – Saturday, Dec 31, 3:30 ESPN, Vanderbilt vs. Cincinnati. Like Mississippi State, Vanderbilt went 2-6 in SEC play. Cincinnati comes in as a 9-3 Big East co-champion. Commodores’ coach James Franklin has his team playing at a high level of confidence and had both Arkansas and SEC East champ Georgia on the ropes late in the fourth quarter. This should be another physical matchup and expect the Commodores to play well enough to win.

CHICK FIL-A – Saturday, Dec 31, 7:30 ESPN, Auburn vs. Virginia. Auburn played poorly against the five best teams they played and were blown out each time. Defensive coordinator Ted Roof and offensive coordinator Gus Malzahn are off to new gigs at UCF and Arkansas State. Virginia’s Mike London has resuscitated a Cavalier football team. This should be a fun game to watch—Virginia will try to exploit a leaky Auburn run defense while Chizik’s Tigers will try to get a young quarterback hitting on all cylinders. Take the over.

CAPITAL ONE – Monday, Jan 2, 1:00 ESPN, Nebraska vs. South Carolina. The Gamecocks are seeking their first 11-win season in program history. Under Steve Spurrier, the program has made a number of strides and has steadily improved its stature in the SEC. Even after a 9-3 season, the Cornhuskers come in as something of a “mystery guest.” Will it be the team that smacked Ohio State and Michigan State, or the team that got blown out by Michigan? Another interesting tidbit—Steve Spurrier is 7-10 all time in bowl games and several of his Florida and South Carolina teams simply don’t show up in the postseason.

GATOR – Monday, Jan 2, 1:00, EPSN2, Ohio State vs. Florida. Two of college football’s recent heavyweights go at it in a rematch of the 2007 BCS Championship Game. How the mighty have fallen—both teams come in at 6-6 and played poorly during the season.  Of course, the real buzz in this game will be the Urban Meyer story, who left Florida after last season, took a year off from coaching and was hired by Ohio State to replace the fired Jim Tressel.

OUTBACK – Monday, Jan 2, 1:00, ABC, Michigan State vs. Georgia. In the third of three bowl games set to kick off at the same time, the Spartans take on SEC East Champ Bulldogs. Both teams come in at 10-3. Michigan State was thoroughly embarrassed by Alabama in last year’s Capital One Bowl, so expect them to play with more intensity and purpose this time around. Georgia has struggled against the best teams they played this year, losing to Boise State and South Carolina to start 0-2, then dropping a blowout in the SEC Championship Game to LSU. Is Michigan State up to the same task? This should be another close one, unless Michigan State learned nothing last year.

COTTON – Friday, Jan 6, 8:00, Fox, Arkansas vs. Kansas State. If Arkansas can’t be in a BCS bowl, then the Cotton is where hog fans want to be. The Wildcats enjoyed one of their best seasons in forever and are excited about the future. The two teams come into Jerry World with identical 10-2 records and the ability to light up the scoreboard with potent offenses. This should be one of the most interesting and high-scoring bowl games on the season, and the fact that it’s the only game on TV that night should draw in the viewers.

BCS CHAMPIONSHIP – Monday, Jan 9, ESPN, Alabama vs. LSU. There’s been enough ink spilled and bandwidth burned on the legitimacy of the “Rematch of the Century.” Like it or not though, fans tuning in will be treated to a contest between the two best teams in the country. When watching the first 12-round heavyweight bout, you got the sense that these two teams were playing not to lose. There were a lot of points left on the field because the coaching staffs played close to the vest. Do you think that’ll happen again? Me either. I expect the gloves to come off and I expect to see both teams taking chances that were unconscionable two months ago.

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There wasn’t much of a choice, even for those of us who didn’t want to see a rematch

The rumblings of a possible rematch in the BCS Championship Game didn’t start when LSU’s Drew Allemand sailed the winning FG through the uprights in overtime. It was old news and all the buzz by then.

The talk started weeks before the heralded defensive slugfest that ended with neither team reaching the endzone. It was all over social media networks, fan message boards, talk radio and even in mainstream reports from major media outlets.

Whoever lost would likely only drop one or two spots in the standings and could climb back into contention for the No. 2 spot in the BCS rankings to get another shot. Crazy talk, right?

It got to the point in the run-up to the game that some knuckleheaded blogger demanded that the “rematch garbage” needed to come to a stop.

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In the absence of a playoff system in the Football Bowl Subdivision, the November 5th meeting between SEC West Titans LSU and Alabama is a BCS Quarterfinal game. The winner goes on to likely win the SEC West division, demolish whatever patsy emerges from the SEC East “who sucks less” race, and play whatever other non-SEC team runs its table and finishes undefeated. Stanford, Oklahoma State, Boise State or Clemson. Any of the four could finish without losing a single game.

To suggest that the human voters in the USA Today and Harris Polls would stomach a one-loss SEC team gaining a rematch against the undefeated, undisputed SEC Champion is patently ridiculous. Quite frankly, anyone suggesting that it could be possible is either a few crab claws short of a bowl of gumbo or is working on an agenda that would throw college football back to the days when #1 and #2 faced each other only eight times in a bowl game in 56 seasons.

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All any one of those four teams had to do was persevere and finish undefeated and they were in the big dance in the Big Easy. None of them did. Stanford lost to Oregon at home. Oklahoma State lost to Iowa State after being up by 17 points in the third quarter. Boise State lost a heartbreaker to TCU and Clemson ended up dropping three of its last five in a classic Clemsonesque meltdown.

To their credit, Oklahoma State did mount a nice rebound by beating a fading Oklahoma team beset with injuries on the same night that Alabama sat at home and watched LSU dismantle Georgia in the SEC Championship Game. OSU’s performance was enough to sway a lot of human voters. With Virginia Tech losing to Clemson in the ACC Championship Game the same day, it was good enough to move the ‘Pokes from No. 4 to No. 3 overall. But as SportsBizMiss Kristi Dosh points out, even if every human voter in both the USA Today and Harris Interactive polls had voted OSU third (some voted them fourth and lower), it still wouldn’t have been enough, and a good chunk of voters had them No. 2. In fact, there was probably a sizable number of poll voters who had Oklahoma State No. 4 or lower and moved them all the way up to No. 2, based on the argument that Bama had its chance and that someone else deserved a shot at LSU. I can’t disagree with that reasoning, but I don’t think I could ever have one team jump another one-loss team when the second one-loss team had done nothing deserving of a knock-down. Alabama didn’t lose last Saturday and the conventional wisdom is that you don’t punish non-losers at the top of the rankings.

Had Oklahoma State not blown a three score lead late in the game against Iowa State, there’d be an alternative to forcing LSU to beat Alabama twice to win the BCS Championship. It’s not fair to LSU to have to do that, but the other teams that had legitimate opportunities to keep it from happening failed to do so.

In that October 27 column, I promised that this space would not contain an argument for having Alabama in a rematch with LSU if the Tide lost the game on November 5. This column is no such argument. It is just an opinion.

Alabama is in a rematch because when all the scores were tallied, all the computer models were run and all the ballots were counted, there was no other choice, even for knuckleheads like me.

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