California Bears 52, Virginia Tech Hokies 49
Washington St. Cougars 28, Texas Longhorns 20



With those two losses I'm all but thrown out of the football pool. Unfortunately, in both cases I changed my prediction before the game, but it doesn't count.

Other than the underdogs winning, what does this games have in common? Mainly that the overdog didn't want to be there. That's why I changed my predictions.

Virginia Tech was, at one point, a national contender. They handily defeated the Miami Hurricanes and had only a single loss to the upset-proned upstarts West Virginia (who themselves had almost beaten Miami). They would probably be the odd men out even if they had gone the rest of the season undefeated, but they didn't and lost their last few games and dropped out from even being ranked. For a team hoping for national contention, the Insight Bowl was a bit of a letdown and they voiced their displeasure.

Texas lost national contention when they lost early to Arkansas and then had their annual beating at the Red River Shootout against Oklahoma, but they were poised for a BCS game until Oklahoma lost against Kansas State, filling the Big 12's BCS slots and sending them for another trip to San Diego for the Holiday Bowl. They've been to San Diego so many times Mack Brown's frequent flier punchcard is about to land him a free pass. The players griped and the result, as with Virginia Tech, was a loss.

Football is probably the most psychological of the major sports. Unlike baseball which is largely a series of individual performances and basketball where there is often plenty of time and points left to score when a team gets on a roll, in football there are so many variables and so many contributors to the game the team becomes a lot more than the sum of its parts. The spirit of the team therefore matters all the more. As Texas and Virginia Tech proved - and Oklahoma before them - if a team doesn't want to win it rarely will.

I was rooting for Virginia Tech and Texas both for a variety of reasons. My father and brother are UT grads and Eel's father went to Virginia Tech (and besides that, Hokies is such a cool team name). So in both cases I got a sinking feeling when I read what the players had to say.

I'm not that disappointed that Texas and VTech lost. It's football and on any given Saturday that type of thing happens. To be sure, neither California nor Washington State were rollovers. WSU only had one more loss than UT and California was on a roll at the end of the season, but if UT and VT were both as good as they thought they were (ie "better" than the bowls they were sent to), the least they could do is come out playing.

The failure in large part resides with the coach. In this case Mack Brown and whateverthehokiescoachnameis. I don't know what Mack Brown was saying to his team - or what Bob Stoops was saying prior to Kansas State - but it's a coach's job to keep the troops rallied and he clearly did not do that. I will have more (positive and negative) to say about Brown later, but it's rather hard to root for a team (be it UT or VT) that complains about a midling bowl when UH alums everywhere were breaking out the champaign for one of the minors.