suicidal saturday

Just because USC was shocked into losing to an unranked team whose school colors remind us of Halloween, doesn’t mean that I’m not going to fulfill my Monday duties of providing the college football roundup. And if you read my Sunday post on the 5 stages of grief, then you’ll be happy to know that I reached ACCEPTANCE at some point yesterday…even if it all still hurts.

Here we go, starting with my only non Saturday entry:

• How ‘bout them Hokies? The Virginia Tech defense that I remember came back with a vengeance on Thursday, turning the Tigers of Clemson into little kittens that rolled over to have their bellies scratched (hmmm…I clearly really want a cat). I have just one question for the Hokies. Where the heck have you been all season? If you’d played like that all season, you’d be a shoe-in to go to the ACC Championship game! Now we all have to sit and wait for Georgia Tech to lose.

• And I just have to use one more bullet for the Tech game and give much props to Brandon Ore, the Hokie running back, who decided to have his big coming out party during the game. The kid ran for over 200 yards and scored 2 touchdowns against Clemson. Everyone knows that Virginia Tech is not necessarily known for its offense. Ore is literally carrying the entire offense on his back as he now has almost 90% of the Hokies total offense for the year.

• Ohio State killed the Gophers of Minnesota. *yawn*
  

• Michigan beat Northwestern, 17-3. Considering how bad N’western is, I’m really surprised that Michigan wasn’t able to score more than 17.

• Oregon bounced back from a big loss to kill poor, little Portland State. Nice to see the Ducks come back and earn a victory against a Div. 1-AA team.

After the USC loss, I pretty much cut myself off of all college football and ESPN viewing, so I’ve got nothing else to say about the other games. Since I’ve run out of stalling tactics, I might as well talk about USC. So, the Trojans went to Corvallis to play the Beavers of Oregon State. The Beavers definitely showed up to play. However, it wasn’t so much that the Beavers earned that victory. It was the Trojans who earned the loss. The Trojans didn’t show up to play until the 3rd quarter and by then, they were down 23 points with 5 minutes left in the 3rd.

USC came alive and played perfectly in the 4th quarter. It was definitely the best I had seen them play all season since the Arkansas game. It looked like they were going to pull off the most amazing comeback, but our 2-point-conversion-to-tie-the-game fell short with a few seconds left in the game.

In all honesty, I knew we were going to lose a game this season. The team had been playing at 70% and just barely winning games. For whatever reason, the team seemed to accept their half-assed attempts to win games as the norm. During the game on Saturday, I actually wanted USC to lose. I was so mad at the team that I had hoped for a loss so the team could learn a lesson. And now that they have lost, I hope the message has finally hit home.

Hey Trojan football players, the lesson is this: You know how you guys played really great football for the last 16 minutes (that’s football minutes, not normal minutes) of the OSU game? Well, a truly great football team plays that way the entire game. So, if you want to be a truly great football team (like our teams the past few years), then you need to play that way against Oregon, Cal, Notre Dame, and UCLA, every minute of every quarter. Sure, there’s a Stanford game coming up, but you guys can play at 50% and still beat the Cardinal (they’re the Duke of the West, after all).

I am comforted by the fact that Notre Dame is still ranked below us.