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Realignment Roundup: The Pac-16 rides againSuperlatives: Georgia Tech spreads the wealth, leaves Kansas D for deadSyracuse and Pitt are officially joining the ACC, at the Big Eastâ??s expenseItâ??s official: At 3:36 a.m. local time, Oklahoma State beats TulsaSurviving Oklahomaâ??s first big road test was a dirty job, but a real BCS frontrunner had to find a way to do itJust when you thought Ohio Stateâ??s QB issues couldnâ??t get any worse, Buckeyes hit bottom in MiamiPatience, please, but Florida appears to be exhibiting signs of lifeTexas turns the page, and finds a new McCoy riding to the rescueJames Vandenbergâ??s perfect fourth quarter saves Iowaâ??s SeptemberAuburnâ??s winning streak dies as it lived: With the defense in flames
Realignment Roundup: The Pac-16 rides againSuperlatives: Georgia Tech spreads the wealth, leaves Kansas D for deadSyracuse and Pitt are officially joining the ACC, at the Big Eastâ??s expenseItâ??s official: At 3:36 a.m. local time, Oklahoma State beats TulsaSurviving Oklahomaâ??s first big road test was a dirty job, but a real BCS frontrunner had to find a way to do itJust when you thought Ohio Stateâ??s QB issues couldnâ??t get any worse, Buckeyes hit bottom in MiamiPatience, please, but Florida appears to be exhibiting signs of lifeTexas turns the page, and finds a new McCoy riding to the rescueJames Vandenbergâ??s perfect fourth quarter saves Iowaâ??s SeptemberAuburnâ??s winning streak dies as it lived: With the defense in flames
It took about a year longer than originally expected, but all signs Sunday night pointed to the same reality: Larry Scott's vision of a 16-team super conference spanning the entire Western half of the continent is back on the table. No, this is not a repeat.
Despite his insistence to the contrary, officials from both the Big 12 and Pac-12 told the New York Times that the Pac-12 commissioner took advantage of Saturday's Texas-UCLA game in Los Angeles to meet with UT president Bill Powers and athletic director DeLoss Dodds over the weekend, informally reviving the audacious plan that appeared set to bring the Longhorns and the rest of the then-extant Big 12 South under the Pac-[X] umbrella last summer. That deal fell apart at the last second for reasons no one quite understood, leaving the Big 12 shaken and vulnerable following the losses of Colorado and Nebraska.
Now, with Texas A&M on the verge of a defection to the SEC and regents from both Oklahoma and Texas expected to set the gears into official motion this afternoon — and with Oklahoma State and Texas Tech prepared to follow the Sooners' and Longhorns' lead — the Big 12 finds itself on the gallows again, with no escape route in sight.
A few points, based on what we know (or think we know) so far:
Texas isn't going to the ACC. The unexpected "Longhorns to ACC?" meme picked up steam over the weekend, when the ACC officially added Pittsburgh and Syracuse to swell its ranks to 14 schools, possibly on the way to sixteen. Per the New York Times, however, "those conversations appear to be over."
This is going to take awhile. Whatever the regents do at today's board meeting, Texas isn't going to run a Pac-16 flag up the pole this afternoon.
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Snap judgments on Saturday's best.
LOGISTICS â?¢ Georgia Tech's Offense.
Conjuring up the ghosts of decades of option-based beatdowns at the hands of Nebraska, the Yellow Jackets' triple-option attack distributed the ball evenly among a dozen different rushers en route to 604 yards and seven touchdowns rushing in a 66-24 annihilation of Kansas. No single Tech player carried the ball more than nine times, but as a team the Jackets averaged more than 12 yards per carry and broke twelve runs covering at least 20 yards, including 95 and 63-yard touchdown runs, respectively, on their first offensive snaps of each half. At one point in the third quarter, they scored four touchdowns in a span of twelve plays , three of them covering more than 50 yards.
With another 164 yards passing on top of the obscene rushing total â??Â Tech quarterback Tevin Washington averaged 23.4 yards on four completions, two of them going for long scores â??Â the Jackets set a school record for total offense and made the Jayhawks look like the modern-day version of Cumberland College .
ENGINEERING â?¢ Marcus Lattimore, South Carolina.
Faced with a serious upset bid from Navy, Carolina put the entire operation on the shoulders of its sophomore workhorse and let him carry the day â??Â quite literally: Lattimore touched the ball 41 times, accounted for 272 total yards and scored all three Gamecock touchdowns in a come-from-behind, 24-21 win . Of South Carolina's 37 snaps in the second half, the ball ended up in Lattimore's hands on 24 of them, including 11 of 15 snaps on a six-minute, 79-yard drive for what turned out to be the winning touchdown: An eight-yard Lattimore run at the start of the fourth quarter.
Honorable Mention: Lamar Miller, Miami. The Hurricanes' sophomore workhorse carried the ball 26 times for 184 yards in the U's 24-6 win over Ohio State, the most by an individual back against a Buckeye defense since the John Cooper era.
ENTREPRENEURSHIP â?¢ Chris Rainey, Florida.
Rainey's major is in "Humanities and Letters," but he executed a fully realized plan for vertical integration of the Gator offense in a 33-23 win over Tennessee, going for 232 all-purpose yards and a touchdown as a rusher, receiver and return man, and setting up another score with a blocked punt in the first half. His 83-yard catch-and-run in the third quarter was Florida's longest play from scrimmage in well over a decade.
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On Monday, the much-discussed, oft-lamented fate of the Big 12 hangs in the balance in board rooms in Norman, Okla., and Austin, Texas, the latest stage in an ongoing melodrama that's ensnared lawyers, lobbyists, politicians and at least five major conferences in its tangled web over the last month. By contrast, the ACC makes the whole sordid business of conference realignment look effortless: With almost no advance warning, the conference has officially announced the additions of longtime Big East members Pittsburgh and Syracuse , swelling its ranks to 14 schools and leaving the Big East scrambling for its life as a major football conference â??Â again â??Â with only seven schools remaining in the fold.
Syracuse was one of seven founding members of the Big East when it was first formed as a non-football conference in 1979; Pitt joined the ranks in 1982, and both were on board when the league began sponsoring football in 1991. With their departures â?? officially mandated by the end of 2013, but likely to come much sooner, possibly by next year â?? five of the Big East's original eight members in football (Boston College, Miami, Pittsburgh, Syracuse and Virginia Tech) will be taking up residence in the ACC, leaving only two still in the fold: Rutgers and West Virginia. And the Scarlet Knights and Mountaineers may be looking for a way out as we speak.
The ACC is playing offense and defense at the same time: In addition to boosting the membership rolls to 14 schools and expanding its presence in the Northeast, it also voted to substantially increase the exit fee for leaving the conference to $20 million, a step clearly aimed at forcing potential SEC targets â?? Clemson, Florida State, Virginia Tech â??Â to think twice about taking calls from the Chosen League in its search for a 14th member to pair with its newest addition, Texas A&M, as soon as the Aggies' pending defection from the Big 12 is finally made official . But with Pitt and Syracuse in the fold, is the ACC content to sit at 14? Or do the Panthers and Orange represent the first step in its bid to go all the way to 16?
If it's the latter, the ACC is likely already making a strong push for Texas , which may not be quite as farfetched as it seems if the Longhorns are really convinced there's no hope for saving the Big 12 .
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Oklahoma State 59, Tulsa 33.
What happens when you combine a late kickoff, a three-hour weather delay and a time-consuming brand of spread football? An actual Division I football game that ends a little after 3:30 in the morning.
Oklahoma State and Tulsa were originally scheduled for a 9 p.m. Central start on Saturday night, apparently hoping to attract a few stray eyeballs on Fox Sports Net after the night's big primetime tilts. Instead, lightning in the Tulsa area pushed the kickoff back to 12:15 a.m., only barely in compliance with NCAA bylaws , and the final gun didn't sound for another three hours. Hey, the show must go on.
On the field, it was over much earlier: Oklahoma State led 31-6 at the half, extending the advantage to 45-6 early in the third quarter before Tulsa started to land a few late, meaningless blows of its own, just keep everyone around a little longer. For the game, both teams combined for 1,029 yards, 61 first downs, eleven touchdowns, nine punts, eight turnovers and eight penalties on 173 plays — all of which, along with 29 incomplete passes, served to keep the game clock in a slow, sleep-deprived crawl to the finish. By the fourth quarter, the worn-out FSN broadcast team appeared to be approaching a state of delirium as officials continued to go through the motions of calling routine holding penalties. You'll recognize them in church this morning as the guys snoring loudly in the back pew, still wearing their game stripes.
Elsewhere in the Big 12, there was no such commitment in Waco, Texas, where Baylor and Stephen F. Austin agreed to call it quits in the third quarter with lightning threatening the game for the second time and Baylor holding an insurmountable 48-0 lead. The Bears have come a long way on the field, but clearly, they still have a lot to learn about passion .
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Matt Hinton is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday .
Oklahoma 23, Florida State 13.
The general obsession coming into this game, in this space and elsewhere, was almost entirely over how Florida State 's defense would hold up against the prolific pace and production of Oklahoma 's offense, and for good reason. The Sooners brought back almost everyone from the attack that incinerated FSU's secondary in a 47-17 massacre last year in Norman, including quarterback Landry Jones and all four receivers he hooked up with there for touchdowns. If you had put together a checklist for beating the Sooners, the first four items would have been a) Contain the passing game, b) "Shorten the game" by winning time of possession, c) Force multiple turnovers, and d) Play them at home.
And the Seminoles hit every item on the list. They got OU in front of a record crowd in Tallahassee. They held them to 314 total yards on just 66 snaps, Oklahoma's worst effort on both counts since 2009. They forced four punts and a pair of field goals with their backs against the goal line. They fought hard, hung around and caught a big break in the fourth quarter, on a 3rd-and-28 prayer from backup quarterback Clint Trickett that somehow found its way to Rashad Greene for a 56-yard touchdown to tie the game with less than 11 minutes to play. And they still lost. By double digits.
After the game, Landry Jones mentioned in an interview the importance of proving the team could "win ugly" on the road, something it failed to do last year in losses at Missouri and Texas A&M , and he's right: The basic doubts about Oklahoma's credentials as a national championship frontrunner (as the national championship frontrunner, according to the current polls) all boil down to that basic question. Every offseason hangup revolved around the defense â??Â Is it tough enough against the run? How much would it miss All-Big 12 linebacker Travis Lewis during his recovery from a foot injury ? How would it cope with the stunning, tragic death of senior linebacker Austin Box ? â??Â and all of them were emphatically answered.
Lewis showed up to play, after all, at least two weeks ahead of schedule. FSU's top three running backs combined for three yards on the ground on 13 carries. Between them, Trickett and starting quarterback E.J. Manuel were sacked five times (including once by Frank Alexander , who was wearing Box's No. 12 jersey for the night) and served up three interceptions (including one by Box's replacement in the middle, sophomore Tom Wort ). By itself, the fluky heave from Trickett to Greene accounted for the Seminoles' only touchdown and more than 20 percent of their total offense. Yes, the Sooners can win ugly when the offense is taking it on the chin.
Still, they never looked more like a team that deserves to have the '1' floating next to its name than immediately after Florida State tied the game, when the offense responded with an eight-play, 83-yard drive to reclaim the lead on a 37-yard touchdown pass from Jones to sophomore Kenny Stills . Less than a minute later, the defense delivered its third interception of the night in FSU territory, setting up Jimmy Stevens ' 31-yard field goal to put the game on ice with a little over two minutes remaining. The ten-point spurt came almost two full quarters after the Sooners' last points, and most of what happened in the meantime â?? six punts, two turnovers, multiple injuries â?? was legitimately ugly all the way around. With its back against the wall, though, in the most hostile environment it will face this season, Oklahoma was up to the occasion.
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Matt Hinton is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday .
Miami 24, Ohio State 6.
OK, look: We knew Ohio State was goingÂ to have some issues on offense. For all his faults as a passer, leader or teammate, Terrelle Pryor remained a nearly unmatched talent under center (or in the shotgun), and his production last year put him right on the verge of justifying the five-star, all-universe hype. As a junior, he finished in the top 10 nationally in pass efficiency, led the Big Ten in touchdown passes and was the best player on an offense that easily averaged more points per game (38.8) than any other Buckeye team in more than a decade. He was the MVP of back-to-back BCS bowl wins. As a senior this fall, the sky was still the limit .
When Pryor walked away in June, the Buckeyes went from a fourth-year starter with legitimate Heisman ambitions, to a fifth-year senior with nowhere near Pryor's athleticism ( Joe Bauserman ) and a None freshman with nowhere near Pryor's experience ( Braxton Miller ). And however bad that sounded on paper, in their first real test of the season, it was much, much worse.
Bauserman, the mature, 25-year-old pocket passer, completed 2 of 13 passes for 13 yards. Miller completed two of four passes for 23 yards and an interception, both completions coming on the final two plays of the game. Prior to the final, meaningless seconds, the Buckeyes completed exactly zero passes for a first down. Zero. Against the same defense that gave 348 yards passing in a loss to Maryland . When they say "the quarterback doesn't have to win the game for us," that's not what they mean.
Maybe it would have helped if the offense's other suspended senior starters â??Â running back Dan Herron , receiver DeVier Posey and lineman [Mike Adams]e|OOD â??Â had been in the fold. It definitely would have helped if the rebuilding OSU defense hadn't been gashed for 188 yards on the ground by Lamar Miller , most by any individual back against the Buckeyes in more than a decade. Maybe if ousted head coach Jim Tressel was still calling the plays.
But the fact is, tonight, Ohio State had no passing game â?? not merely a mediocre or bad passing game, like the one on display last week against Toledo , but literally no passing game. Neither Bauserman nor Miller was a threat, or looked like he was going to be a threat any time soon against a competent defense, of which there are many more waiting over the remainder of the schedule. The running game is going to be fine. The defense had a rough night, but it's going to be alright, too. If this is what the quarterbacks are going to look like the rest of the way against non-MAC defenses, though, the Buckeyes may have inadvertently instituted a bowl ban on themselves.
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Matt Hinton is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday .
Florida 33, Tennessee 23.
It didn't dredge up memories of the old Fun 'n Gun, or of Urban Meyer's prolific spread passing attacks. And honestly, no one was expecting it to. But from the first play of the game â??Â a simple screen pass that tailback Chris Rainey took for 21 yards â??Â Florida had the look of team that had rediscovered the weapons it seemed to forget it had over the last two years. More importantly, with new offensive coordinator Charlie Weis calling the shots, it looked like a team that has some idea how to use them.
Rainey went over 100 yards on the ground for the second week in a row â??Â a mark he never hit under Weis' predecessor, Steve Addazio â??Â and over 200 yards total offense for the first time in his career. John Brantley didn't reveal a previously dormant howitzer grafted to his shoulder, but he did throw two touchdown passes, didn't throw an interception and finished with the best pass efficiency rating of his career (166.6). The defense kept the heat on Tennessee quarterback Tyler Bray , dropping him three times with two interceptions (not including another pick that was negated by one of the Gators' 16 penalties) and a forced fumble. It was … solid .
All of which may well be forgotten by the time Alabama is pulling out of Gainesville in two weeks, at the same point on the schedule that the Crimson Tide mercilessly exposed Florida last year â?? the Gators were coming off a nearly identical win over Tennessee then, too, and went on to drop five in a row against teams that finished with winning records. As a single brick in the wall, though, Florida fans got exactly what they wanted: A team that was aggressive on both sides of the ball, took the initiative right out of the gate, generated big plays on offense, was never in danger of yielding its two-score cushion and leaves as a very real contender to retake its place at the top of the SEC East.
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Matt Hinton is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday .
Texas 49, UCLA 20.
I got the distinct sense over the past week that Texas fans were consciously holding their tongues, sitting on their hands, biding their time â?? anything to keep expectations under control after watching the Longhorns respond to a long-awaited quarterback change last week by rallying from a 13-0 deficit to beat BYU. So much for the "patient" routine: The difference since maligned starter Garrett Gilbert was yanked against the Cougars is so stark, Mack Brown and his coaches are going to have a hard time explaining why it took so long in the first place.
The first calls for Gilbert's exit came almost exactly a year ago, after the offense sleepwalked through a 34-12 embarrassment against UCLA that sent the Longhorns into a season-long tailspin. Against the very same Bruins today, on their field, Case McCoy was a revelation of precisely the opposite variety: Excluding games against teams whose mascot is an owl, Texas gained significantly more yards (487) and scored significantly more points (49) in McCoy's first career start than it managed in any of a dozen outings under Gilbert. With two touchdowns, zero turnovers and a sky-high 218.8 pass efficiency rating in the process, he's already destined to draw premature comparisons to his older brother on the box score alone. But then he also does this:
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Iowa 31, Pittsburgh 27.
I wasn't in Kinnick Stadium, so I wouldn't want to report exactly what Iowa fans were saying to one another in the third quarter as if I had some sort of transcript. But it's not hard to guess: A week after being punched in the throat in a triple overtime loss to rival Iowa State , the Hawkeyes trailed Pitt 24-3 on the heels of two unanswered Panther touchdowns, had yet to find the end zone themselves and were 15 minutes away from falling to 1-2 on back-to-back losses to teams they were supposed to beat. Hint: There weren't any parties being planned for quarterback James Vandenberg â?? at least, not any that he'd want to attend.
It was right about this time that Vandenberg was possessed by the spirit of John Elway in his prime.* The next four times the Hawkeyes touched the ball, Vandenberg connected on 15 of 18 passes to five different receivers, racked up more than 235 total yards and led four consecutive touchdown drives covering 60, 73, 64 and 64 yards. The first he finished off with a one-yard sneak for the score; the next three, he capped with TD passes to Keenan Davis , Kevonte Martin-Manley and then Martin-Manley again for the game-winner . A subsequent interception by safety Micah Hyde put the biggest comeback in Iowa history on ice, and much relieved dancing ensued .
And just like that, in a matter of minutes, the Hawkeyes' season no longer seems destined for complete disaster before it really begins. In fact, with five consecutive games against Louisiana-Monrore, Penn State (the Nittany Lions barely escaped today at Temple ), Northwestern , Indiana and Minnesota on the docket, and a quarterback who may have just grown up before the home crowd's eyes â??Â the ones who stayed, anyway â??Â they still have every reason to except to remain in the thick of the Big Ten race well into November. From there, well, Iowa fans don't need to reminded how slippery things get from there .
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* I'm imagining some sort of corn-powered Quantum Leap accelerator .
Matt Hinton is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday .
Clemson 38, Auburn 24.
When you've won 17 games in a row, at some point, you start to take certain things for granted. Before today, Auburn's thing was a certain resiliency in the face of a porous defense: The Tigers came in with ten straight wins when trailing or tied in the fourth quarter, and seven straight when giving up more than 30 points. They'd already emerged unscathed from a pair of wild, improbable shootouts in their first two games. When the going gets tough, Auburn gets to doing whatever it has to do â??Â an onside kick, goal-line stop â??Â to win.
Eventually, there was bound to be a day when the going got tough and just kept going. Today was that day. And it went exactly the way it was always bound to: With the bend-don't-break defense shattering all over the field.
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