The legal saying “The defense rests” applied on Saturday a lot more than fans in outposts like Columbia, Austin and South Bend would have liked. The defenses of South Carolina, Texas and Notre Dame were positively awful in big road losses that reshaped TheSportsNotebook’s BCS bowl projections. Here’s the rundown on the damage and the new-look bowl projections.
TheSportsNotebook has been on a boot camp run of college football coverage, having previewed all ten conferences and the major independents. With the season set to start on Thursday night, it’s time to summarize it all and make closing arguments.
The Big 12 may be out of the national championship picture with Kansas State’s shocking 52-24 loss at Baylor on Saturday night. But the game underscored just how good this league is from top to bottom and both its conference title race and bowl picture are very much up in the air with two weeks to play. There’s a Fiesta Bowl bid on the line, a possible at-large slot in the BCS and a host of quality bowls against Pac-12 & Big Ten competition mixed in. Today we’ll try and sort out some Big 12 bowl projections.
You know about the chaos that reigned on Saturday in college football, as Kansas State & Oregon fell, to the great benefit of Notre Dame, Alabama and Georgia, who now all control their destiny for the national championship. If the chalk holds for two weeks, we’ll see Notre Dame beat USC and take on the winner of the Alabama-Georgia SEC championship game. But what if the chalk doesn’t hold?
Alabama was the big loser on Saturday in their 29-24 loss to Texas A&M, falling from the #1 spot in the BCS standings down to #4 and putting themselves in need of substantial help to get back into the national championship picture. But there were other losers to. Let’s run through teams and conferences that are up against it, as we begin another round of BCS bowl projections.
We’ve got four weeks of college football under our belts, and conference play is going to increase dramatically starting on Saturday, so right now is as good a time as any to revisit and revise the preseason expectations for each conference and make another—likely futile—shot at projecting out the major bowl matchups and the teams who will play for the national title.