Saturday 6:30pm Robertson Stadium TV: CBS College Sports SMU is 2-0 in C-USA. Coogs need to come out strong, can't wait until the second half to start putting points on the board against this team. SMU 24 Coogs 45 Over/Under: 0.5 missed extra points in this game by the Coogs?
Big win by UTEP last night against a good Tulsa team. Link Miner meltdown continues to cause major headaches for UH UTEP: the loss that just keeps giving. Giving Houston Cougars fans heartburn. The Miners of UTEP re-assumed the driver's position in the Conference USA West race with a fourth-quarter comeback that pulled out a 28-24 victory against Tulsa on Wednesday night. If UTEP wins the rest of its games, then there's nothing the Cougars — the only ranked team in C-USA — can do to win the West. All thanks to that major meltdown in Miner country. On top of keeping the 17th-ranked Cougars out of the top 10, or at least off the doorstep, that 58-41 defeat is a pain in the Heisman Trophy candidacy of quarterback Case Keenum. Halfway through the regular season, Keenum is on pace to complete 432 of 616 passes (70.1 percent) for 5,002 yards, 38 touchdowns and eight interceptions — with six rushing touchdowns for good measure. Keenum leads the nation in total offense (429.5 yards per game, passing (416.8 per yards per game, nearly 80 more than anybody else) and ranks ninth in passing efficiency. If Keenum keeps this up, he'll have the 10th 5,000-yard Division I-A passing season on record. And why wouldn't he be able to do so? He passed for 5,020 yards last season, his first in Dana Holgorsen's no-huddle, spread system. Keenum has this season's single-game national highs in completions (51), attempts (76) and passing yards (536) — all against UTEP. See, there's the floater in the punch bowl. If Keenum were the quarterback of an unbeaten UH team, the time might be ripe for him to be a Heisman frontrunner. Reigning Heisman winner Sam Bradford has had his season ruined by injuries, and Texas' Colt McCoy has regressed to his error-prone sophomore ways, and plenty of people are looking for reasons to vote for somebody besides Florida's Tim Tebow. As it is, Keenum ranks sixth in the latest HeismanPundit.com straw poll of Heisman voters. Heisman Pundit has 13 voters from across the country cast weekly ballots to track the hot and not-so-hot candidates. This week's top 10 (first-place votes in parenthesis): 1. Mark Ingram, RB, Alabama (4) 2. Tim Tebow, QB, Florida (6) 3. Jimmy Clausen, QB, Notre Dame (1) 4. Ndamukong Suh, DT, Nebraska 5. Tony Pike, QB, Cincinnati (1) 6. Case Keenum, QB, Houston 7. Colt McCoy, QB, Texas 8. Golden Tate, WR, Notre Dame (1) 9. Jacquizz Rodgers, RB, Oregon State 10. Kellen Moore, QB, Boise State CBSSports.com has Keenum running fourth in the race, trailing Ingram, Tebow and Clausen and just ahead of Fresno State running back Ryan Matthews and Miami quarterback Jacory Harris. An ESPN.com panel also has Ingram-Tebow-Clausen-Keenum running 1-2-3-4, trailed by McCoy and Moore. College Football News, for its part, makes a case for Keenum being the most deserving of all the candidates. The harsh reality for Keenum is that players from non-Bowl Championship Series schools rarely emerge as anything more than fringe contenders. The last player from a non-BCS school to win the Heisman was Ty Detmer in 1991 — seven years before the pox that is the BCS fell upon college football. Since then, there have been only 10 top-five finishes in the Heisman voting by players outside the power-broker conferences. Quarterback Colt Brennan led Hawaii to a 12-0 regular-season record in 2007 and settled for third. Quarterback Alex Smith led Utah to a perfect season in 2004 and finished fourth. Since 1990, the best finish by a player from outside the BCS schools was a runner-up by San Diego State's Marshall Faulk in 1992. Even with the credibility Faulk gained that season, he fell to fourth in the 1993 Heisman voting. Still, Cougars fans can't help but wonder what might have been if not for that lost Saturday night in El Paso.
Man would that suck if UTEP and UH win out and UH winds up ranked but unable to go to the Conference title game because of their loss to the UTEP. Then again, would that give UH a chance at a better bowl?
I know it won't happen this year, but it would be cool to see quizz rodgers win the heisman. He went to the same high school i did.
Houston would end up in one of these bowls: Hawaii, Bell Hellicopter Armed Forces, New Orleans, St. Petersburg, EagleBank, Texas
If a conference doesn't have enough bowl eligible teams often times a bowl can cherry pick a team from another conference to fill the spot. So if CUSA produces more bowl eligible teams than it has bowl contracts, etc etc...
But wouldn't those bowls be really crappy? I mean, you'd be trading one low end bowl for another low end bowl. What's the point? Also, why would one of the CUSA bowls pass up on getting a highly ranked team (much higher ranked than you'd normally get out of CUSA) for a worse team?
Can you provide an example? CUSA has automatic bids to 5 bowls that they have to fulfill. After that, they have an agreement with the EagleBank bowl and Texas Bowl to fulfill those bowls if the primary conferences for those bowls don't have enough eligible teams. In the SEC, there are nine bowls, with the bottom two already having deals with the Sun Belt Conference if there aren't eligible Sun Belt teams. The ACC also has 9 bowl tie ins, but the bottom two are the GMAC Bowl and EagleBank, which CUSA is already tied in with.
Not off the top of my head, no. Unfortunately it isn't an easy thing to google either. I do remember a funky situation back in 2003 where TCU refused to play their bowl obligation and instead strong-armed there way into another bowl, which in turn almost screwed UH over because the bowl they were slotted into was then released from their obligation to pick a CUSA team, or something to that affect, but they ended up going with one anyway so the dominoes fell properly and nobody missed out.
It does change the dynamics of things with CUSA picking up 2 additional bowl affiliations this year though. Back when there were 5 bowls, we did field 6 bowl eligible teams before and had to do some interesting shuffling to get it all worked out.
Me either. They are terrible on the road and have a 3 game roadie coming up. Albeit against crap teams. But they should drop one at least.
