Wednesday, January 02, 2008

My Complete Thoughts on the Sugar Bowl

Georgia is a much, much better team than Hawaii. Is there anything else to say? The Dawgs could run against nine-man fronts and Colt Brennan had no time to throw and no open receivers to locate. End of story.

OK, one other thought. The game illustrated the importance of margin of victory in evaluating teams. Hawaii's close wins over bad teams were a major red flag that separated them from the '04 Utah or '06 Boise State. The standard for mid-majors making BCS games should not simply be whether the mid-major is unbeaten. Rather, mid-majors need to beat their opponents in the same manner that a quality team would.

And one other thought: Georgia has really struck out in the Mark Richt era in terms of playing exciting opponents in bowl games. Georgia has made three Sugar Bowls. In them, they've played a mediocre Florida State team, a West Virginia team that no one took seriously at the time (although, in retrospect, that was a very good opponent), and a Hawaii team that didn't belong on this stage. Other than those games, UGA has had some humdrum games against uninteresting Wisconsin, Purdue, and Boston College teams and the somewhat appealing Peach Bowl match-up against Virginia Tech.

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