Three hours, 37 minutes. That’s how far it is from the Cotton Bowl to North Shore High in Houston, from where some key UNLV football players will compete in the program’s first bowl game since 2000 on Wednesday to where they played for a prep program led by one of the winningest coaches in Texas history.
How many people around here wish UNLV were playing Arkansas or somebody like that in its bowl game on Wednesday morning? (Ooh! Ooh-Ooh! That was me raising my hand and doing an Arnold Horshack impression.)
In the depths of failure, Jim Livengood still believed.
A Week 17 schedule that shaped up as potentially explosive on paper surpassed all expectations. Thirteen of the 16 games had playoff implications. From Chicago to San Diego to Dallas, it was as great as it gets.
In no way is Aaron Rodgers a clown, but when the Green Bay Packers quarterback was trotted out to meet with the media Thursday, circus music should have been playing in the background.
It was Dec. 15, 1984, and the Hawaiian Airlines charter, a DC-9, was sitting on the tarmac at the air terminal in Fresno, Calif., ready for takeoff.
It’s not easy to change a person with a losing attitude, and the same goes for turning around a terrible team. With that thought in mind, what coach Bruce Arians is doing in Arizona is just short of amazing.
If this is how its conference champion looks, the Mountain West isn’t close to average on a national scale. Fresno State was never in its 45-20 loss to Southern California in the Las Vegas Bowl on Saturday, never competitive at Sam Boyd Stadium against a No. 5 selection out of the Pac-12, never close to being on an even level of size, speed, strength, skill and execution.
At this point, there’s not much left to like about the Dallas Cowboys, who are riding a broken-down donkey of a coach and following a quarterback, Tony Romo, who can’t shoot straight under pressure.
The NFL agent was talking about the inevitability of comparison between draft choices past and present, about how scouts and general managers might look down on a wide receiver from one school because others from it had failed, about how they might downgrade a linebacker because his was a college system that doesn’t always transfer successfully to the pros.
A sense of impending doom surrounded the Chicago Bears when Jay Cutler, who might or might not be the franchise’s future quarterback, limped off the field with a groin injury. With Cutler, it often appears to be loser’s limp, but this injury was legit.
Telltale signs your favorite college football team has accepted an invitation to a lousy bowl game:
Even when the odds are against Tom Brady, we expect him to succeed. He captains comebacks like no other quarterback in the NFL. So we expect him to succeed especially when the odds are against him.
On and off the field, the Washington Redskins are a mess. Full responsibility for that falls on the narrow shoulders of coach Mike Shanahan, a manipulator not to be taken at face value.
