Good Games, Bad Games...

Even though it wasn’t the most watched National Championship game in the BCS era, I still watched it. That is what I like to do, and I do it very well. Who did I want to win this game really doesn’t matter. I was leaning both ways at times and in the end I was cheering for Alabama offensive coordinator Jim McElwain.

Now, if you have a question mark over your head right now, I can understand why. So here is the answer to your question. McElwain quarterbacked the Eastern Washington Eagles in the mid-1980s.

He is an alumnus and so am I. This all means that the Eagle grad now has two national championship rings from his days in Alabama. Next season McElwain will become the head coach of the Colorado State Rams. Good luck in trying to turn things around in Fort Collins. One thing Coach Mac has going for him is some great experience in doing just that.

Now back to the national championship game. Entertaining it was not, at least when it came to competitive offenses going after each other. But if you are a defensive aficionado, then you were in seventh heaven watching the big hits and the punter trot on the field mostly from the LSU side of the ball.

Any time you have two teams that have played each other earlier in the season to a virtual standstill and then let them wait 37 and 44 days since their last game, anything can happen and in a lot of cases the team that lost the first game comes back to win the bigger game.

Why? Because the losing team often realizes just how close they were to victory and they come to the game well prepared and very confident.

Whereas the winning team basks in the glory and forgets what happened in that game that brought them victory.

Alabama won the first game on the field but several missed field goals led to an LSU win. When the kicker for the Crimson Tide started hitting those field goals in the BCS finale and LSU struggled to even cross the fifty–yard line, I’m sure the Tigers could see their dream season ending, which it did in a 21-0 shellacking.

As usual, the BCS committee was soon talking about tweaking the format once again. No playoff but a plus-one game.

What this would mean is that the No. 1 team would play No. 4, and No. 2 plays No. 3 in a bowl game. The winners would play a week later in the championship finale.

So we are at least getting it a lot closer to a playoff system. No, not eight or 16 teams but four teams is a start in the right direction. Stay tuned, we’ll see if they can figure it out this time.

When it comes to the NFL there were some exciting games and a couple that had a little bit to be desired. As in the NCAA championship there were a couple of games where opponents faced off against each other again.

New England handled Denver easily as they did in the earlier contest. But the New York Giants put an end to the Green Bay Packers’ chance for a repeat Super Bowl game. Green Bay seems to have been doing too many discount double check commercials and not making enough defensive stops.

Now, New York travels to San Francisco for the NFC championship. San Francisco and New York had one thing in common in the games they played this weekend, and that was the ability to cause turnovers.

Turnovers are often hard to come by and are not always something a team can rely on getting.

There were good games and bad games in the last week or two, and as fans, we always hope for the good ones. But as fans, we’ll even stick around and watch the bad ones.