For three decades, the late Allan Malamud’s signature insights into the world of sports graced the pages of the Los Angeles newspapers.
He titled his four weekly columns, “Notes on a Scorecard,” a tag that has been purloined frequently since Malamud’s passing in 1996.
TCU fans may recall former athletic director Chris Del Conte using the name for his website updates to Frog Nation, though I would argue the notion that Del Conte ever purchased and/or jotted down anything on a scorecard at any time during his eight years in Fort Worth.
Allan Malamud may not have coined the “Notes on a Scorecard” name, but he certainly laid down the blueprint.
Lacking a true scorecard, therefore, please allow me to present my first (and probably last) “Notes on a Cheez-It Box,” as I clear the palette of all things bowl-related.
Forgive me, Allan . . .
Loved the Sugar Bowl, but Kirby Smart’s Georgia team needs to look itself in the mirror after being “outplayed, out-coached and out-physicaled” by the Texas Longhorns. I didn’t render that assessment – it came from Smart himself.
Smart had promised on New Year’s Eve that the Bulldogs would be “out to make a statement” after being left out of the four-team playoff.
Every bowl team has a statement to make, I suppose, until they get hit in the mouth. Once Texas was up 17-0, the Bulldogs seemed to forget what they were there for . . .
The same thing happened to Georgia during the regular season against LSU, when the Tigers answered the bell much more physically and jumped to a 16-0 halftime lead. LSU beat the Bulldogs 36-16 and the similarity between that day’s stats and the Sugar Bowl’s were telling. Texas held Georgia to 72 yards on the ground, 296 overall. (LSU’s defense gave up 113 rushing, 322 total).
Were the Bulldogs overrated, as the UT fans chanted in the Superdome?
Yeah, they were.
It’s the narrow 35-28 SEC championship game loss to Alabama that now seems the outlier.
While we’re at it, say what you will about Sam Ehlinger’s emergence at quarterback, but it was coordinator Todd Orlando’s defense that formed the backbone of this Texas team . . .
That makes four times in 10 years that a highly ranked SEC runner-up was beaten by a lower-rated opponent in the Sugar Bowl.
For Tom Herman’s Texas team, it was a business trip, not a weekend in the French Quarter . . .
The PETA people are only doing their jobs, I know, bleating about the treatment of animals, but they need to stay in their lane about the live mascot thing. I doubt that there is a better-treated longhorn steer on the planet than UT’s Bevo, who travels in a 25-foot trailer with a police escort and has an air-conditioned holding pen at home games.
Similarly, Georgia’s bulldog mascot flies with the team and stays in the same hotel as the players.
The students in charge of tending to Bevo have disputed the idea that the Texas mascot was somehow “charging” Uga. The two had actually “met” and posed for a docile photo the day before the game . . .
Pals #HornsInNOLA #SugarBowl pic.twitter.com/K7YJ7djv4F
— BEVO XV (@TexasMascot) December 31, 2018
Bowl teams that should have just sent a postcard instead of playing the game:
Notre Dame, Houston, Miami, North Carolina State, San Diego State, Georgia Tech, Michigan and South Carolina.
All too often, a different team – mentally and physically — shows up for the bowl game than the one that ended the regular season . . .
Early game of the year next season:
Sept. 7, LSU vs Texas in Austin.
Could well be a match-up of top-six ranked teams. Winner will get a huge springboard to the rest of the season . . .
Speaking of LSU, its SEC rivals appeared overjoyed on social media that the Tigers silenced Central Florida and ended UCF’s unbeaten string.
Don’t let anyone tell you that the Knights validated their claims to playoff status by only losing to the Tigers by seven points. LSU dominated the game, despite playing without nine starters on defense (injuries, one suspension and two early departees to the NFL Draft).
Following the UCF saga, I was tempted at first to draw a parallel to what TCU went through in its pre-Big 12 days. But in the end, the two programs’ paths are not even close.
TCU raised its profile quietly and resolutely over 10 years, scheduling (and winning) road games at Clemson, Oklahoma and Stanford, and winning 10 or more games nine times in 12 seasons before receiving – not demanding – an invitation to join the Big 12.
The Frogs didn’t throw themselves any parades, even after going 13-0 and beating Big Ten champion Wisconsin in the 2010 season’s Rose Bowl.
Watching the Fiesta Bowl on Tuesday, it was sorta sad to see a UCF team that had so much to gain from its two-year story resort to cheap shots and taunting against LSU. The early chippy play only served to wake up LSU, which ended up out-gaining the Knights 555 yards to 250 and controlling the ball for 44:31 of the game’s 60 minutes . . .
Meanwhile in Phoenix, we witnessed a masterpiece of unexpected proportions. In his story on the CBS Sports website, writer Tom Fernelli ranked all of this season’s 39 bowl games from worst to best, and guess who played in his No. 1?
The link to Fornelli’s story:
Here’s what he wrote about the “best” of the bowl games:
- Cheez-It — TCU 10, California 7 OT: Yes, that’s right. My No. 1 bowl game this season featured 17 points and nine turnovers. Believe me, this was not a pretty game. It was not a well-played game. In fact, I’m confident both Gary Patterson and Justin Wilcox will burn the tape and move on to prepare for next season rather than go over what went wrong. But in spite of all that, it was great. There were so many moments in this game where you were openly announcing to yourself, or a crowded room, “What the f— was that!?” If you were watching this game in a bar or alongside thousands of your closest friends on Twitter, it wasn’t just a game but a social event. Twenty years from now, you won’t remember most things from the 2018 college football bowl season, but I guarantee you’ll remember watching the Cheez-It Bowl. Just beautifully bad football. A cult classic. Five stars. If they ever make it into a movie, both The Rock and Jason Statham will be in it.
As someone who has witnessed in person nearly every TCU bowl game since 1984, I have to agree with Fornelli’s charmed assessment.
It wasn’t just the nine interceptions, but rather that both TCU’s and Cal’s defenses were making a mockery of the two offenses. There were as many flying tackles as errant passes.
Adding to the strange night was that in Chase Field, converted from baseball to football, our press box vantage point was what is normally home plate – the upper corner of the end zone on this night. It was like trying to watch a TV game from the hall bathroom.
As the night progressed, the Twitter one-liners suggested that people weren’t going to bed until the last sports information director was left standing.
While the Frogs ran around after the game, giddily waving the bowl sponsor’s product and posing for selfies, I saw senior quarterback Grayson Muehlstein – 20 passes, 27 yards, 4 interceptions, 60-plus minutes of mostly chaos — standing alone by the first base dugout.
He looked like a guy who had just escaped a plane crash, not the winning quarterback . . .
Are there too many bowls? Not at all. The Frogs’ Cheez-It celebration was genuine. Some 36 other bowl-winning teams also got to hoist a trophy and go home with bowl swag and memories.
Some teams quit. Some coaches already had their bags packed. Some players elected to start preparing for the NFL.
Too bad. They missed some classics . . . until the movie comes out.
