The NFL playoffs might take over the sports world for this weekend, but college bowl season still goes each day. It starts Friday night with a Cotton Bowl matchup that’s as good as any of the major bowl games, and then has lower-tier games on Saturday & Sunday, in the time slots that wrap around the four NFL first-round playoff games.
The final two days of calendar year 2013 in the college bowl season saw Mack Brown coach his final game, and Johnny Manziel play what most believe will be his final game at Texas A&M. Mack didn’t get a fitting exit, but Johnny Football went out in style, leading a dramatic comeback. These two games lead up our review of December 30-31
New Year’s Night’s college football action will feature the Fiesta Bowl, as the Baylor Bears and the Central Florida Knights take the field in Tempe (8:30 PM ET, ESPN). The nine key points to take into this game—the Notebook Nine—based on personnel matchups, season-long performance, historical context and the view from Las Vegas are below.
New Year’s Day doesn’t bring an end to the college football season and settle a national champion the way it used to, but in terms of raw volume, January 1 still brings the biggest feast of the college bowl season. Four games will set the table in the early afternoon, with three Big Ten-SEC matchups.
The college bowl season took a break for the NFL on Sunday, but gets back going full blast on Monday. We’ll take a look at the eight games that will go over the course of December 30-31, as the SEC swings into action and the Pac-12 looks to build off a strong early showing as most of their upper crust takes the field.
Let’s take a look back on those first eight games and sort out what we learned. And the first lesson is that the MAC’s problems on the postseason stage aren’t anywhere close to going away.
The college football bowl schedule gets cranking on Friday, as we enter a period where five of the next six days have all day action, stopping only for the NFL this coming Sunday.
This segment of TheSportsNotebook’s coverage will focus on the Friday-Saturday run that takes us into the NFL intermission. The pointspread and the Over/Under totals line is listed next to the favorite for each game, along with the TV time…
The opening act of the college football bowl schedule begins Saturday, and TheSportsNotebook will focus on the first eight games–the octave, if you will–that will cover December 21 through December 26…
Bowl season is like a great symphony, with its gradual buildup, alternating between a rapid pace and slower movement, and finally building to its championship crescendo. What we’re going to do here today is break down the schedule by those movements. TheSportsNotebook’s bowl coverage will be structured around this schedule layout, with previews and wrap-ups as each movement begins and ends.
There are nineteen games in the books for this college bowl season but none of them have involved the SEC. The nation’s most highly regarded conference now swings into action, with teams in five of the eight games that will take place from New Year’s Eve on Monday through the first part of New Year’s Day on Tuesday. Three of those involve SEC teams currently ranked in the Top 10 and likely playing to stay there.
It’s those games—involving South Carolina, Georgia and LSU that will lead our preview of what we’ll dramatically call the New Year’s Octave, the sequence of eight games that starts at noon ET on Monday and leads up to the Rose Bowl at 5 PM ET on Tuesday.
The Big 12 has spent the regular season building a credible record as the nation’s best conference, with nine of ten teams going to bowl games, with Kansas State being a legitimate part of the national elite and Oklahoma not far behind. But just as championships aren’t won in September, nor is an honor for the nation’s best conference. The Big 12 needs to make a definitive case in the bowls, on Saturday night there are two noteworthy games. Texas plays Oregon State, followed by TCU matching up with Michigan State in an ESPN sequence beginning at 6:45 PM ET. It’s these two games that will serve as TheSportsNotebook’s focal point, as we preview the 11 games coming up on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, as college bowl season heats up.
The city of New York opens the week in sports tonight, with the Jets playing Tennessee in Monday Night Football (8:30 PM ET, ESPN) and the Big Apple comes close to closing it as well, when it’s Giants-Ravens (4:25 PM ET, Fox) in the featured late afternoon game next Sunday. The Jets are unexpectedly in the playoff picture if they win tonight and the Giants are unexpectedly in danger of falling out, having lost control of their destiny in the NFC East and struggling to hold on for a wild-card.