New Year’s Eve bowl games: Chick-fil-A, Sun, Music City, Liberty ring in 2013

This isn’t the first that has leaked about the fight, as USC grad Heather Brittany tweeted about the incident on New Year’s Day (h/t to The Big Lead):

USC’s trip to the Sun Bowl was nothing short of a mess before the fight occurred. The team showed up over 90 minutes late to dinner with Georgia Tech, and players were forced to apologize for disparaging marks made about the host city, El Paso, Texas.

11. LSU possessions that lasted three or fewer plays in a 25-24 loss to Clemson in the Chick-Fil-A Bowl. The Bayou Bengals went three-and-out eight times, and scored 14 of their 24 points on immediate touchdowns. On the first drive of each half, LSU gained 80 yards in three plays and scored twice. In their other 45 plays, the Tigers gained just 139 yards. They went three-and-out in each of their final three possessions of the game. The Clemson defense, improved but still maligned in 2012, played what was easily its best game of the season, holding LSU to 4.6 yards per play and persistently harassing LSU quarterback Zach Mettenberger.

Three-and-outs are always a problem in football; punt too quickly, too often, and eventually your defense might wear down. But against Clemson, this is not dangerous, it’s deadly. LSU indeed ran just 48 plays on Monday night; Clemson ran 100 of them. And eventually, LSU showed the slightest of cracks. After averaging just 4.1 yards per play and scoring 15 points in its first 13 drives, Clemson averaged 5.8 and scored 10 points in its final two.

But, you know, Les Miles, I guess? /shrug

It came down to the final minute anyway, with Clemson missing a two-point conversion (necessitated by an earlier blocked extra point) and getting a chance at a game-winning drive with two minutes to go. Tajh Boyd and “Nuk” Hopkins strung together a 60-yard drive just long enough for the Tigers to poke through a game-winning field goal as the clock died.

owwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

[looks in mirror]

“Dabo Swinney”

Hopkins has now broken Herman Moore of Virginia’s 1990 ACC record for consecutive games with a touchdown, with 10. He entered the game with 1,214 yards receiving on the year.

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Cussing!

Georgia Tech’s strong running attack gave USC’s defense problems all game. They carried the ball 61 times for 293 yards, good for an average of nearly five yards a carry. The Jackets had just 10 pass attempts. It was apparent from the opening kickoff that they had a game plan, and coach Paul Johnson stuck to it throughout.

With the win, Georgia Tech finishes the season with a 7-7 record. USC drops to 7-6.

It would appear one frisky engineer was just a little bit too fired up about spending the night out on the town in El Paso after Georgia Tech’s (very likely) Sun Bowl win over preseason No. 1 USC. He will now spend his evening blaming Mark Richt for the arrests of his fellow overnight roommates.

Or maybe that’s Monte Kiffin. I don’t know.

What we’re more concerned with, however, is the Mad Max-style wasteland that is visible through the tunnel there. In a scene straight out of Beyond Thunderdome, there’s a padded bruiser with a weird gold hat and barricades set up so drifters can’t get at the barbarians’ horde of precious gasoline. Some things are about to happen in that tunnel, y’all. Things we may not be entirely comfortable with. Begone ye, glimpse of a horrific desert-themed postapocalyptic future. We’re trying to watch football here.

/takes crossbow bolt in neck

Georgia Tech and USC are going to score a whole lot of points in the Sun Bowl. This flag is going to need to be brought onto the windy field to celebrate many, many touchdowns. Someone’s finishing this game with BLASTED FOREARMS.

Nerds at Georgia Tech! Please harness this power, so that our energy woes may be solved!

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Former N.C. State teammate and current Packers defender reacts to Winkles’ work:

And, yeah, this sort of thing should be noted:

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Cody Green (QB, Tulsa, Jr.). The Nebraska transfer was, in a word, horrible against ISU on September 1. It was his first start for the Golden Hurricane, and it looked like it. Green completed just 23 of 49 passes for 198 yards, two touchdowns, two picks and two sacks (average yards per pass attempt: 3.5) and carried seven times for minus-3 yards. Again, pretty awful. After the Iowa State game, however, Green improved dramatically, completing 56 percent of his passes (still pretty low), throwing 15 touchdown passes to eight interceptions, taking just six sacks and rushing for 281 non-sack yards and three touchdowns. Tulsa’s passing game is quick and relatively conservative, and Green’s completion percentage just isn’t high enough to make Tulsa’s an elite offense, but there’s no question that he has looked much, much better since the trip to Ames. How much of his struggles were due to Iowa State’s defense, and how much were due to first-start jitters and issues? We’ll see.

1. The first game was pretty fun. Iowa State scored early on a long touchdown pass, Tulsa surged to a 16-7 lead at the end of the first quarter, Iowa State bounced back to take a 24-16 lead, and the Cyclones put away a 38-23 win with the aforementioned late pick and easy touchdown. There were 800 yards, four turnovers, and three lead changes. Nothing wrong with that, right?

Zac Stacy (RB, Vanderbilt, Sr.). Are bowling-ball running backs your thing? Then you’ll enjoy Stacy, who goes 5’9, 210 pounds and runs tough. He is not always successful at running the ball, but his toughness sets the tone for the tough Commodores, who have proven that, if nothing else, they will continue coming at you, even if you stop them a few times. And if you don’t stop Stacy, you simply aren’t going to have much of a chance.

1. Because James Franklin wants you to watch. Few teams have so quickly adopted the personality of their head coach. He has quadrupled Vanderbilt’s toughness -- he seems to have successfully adopted Jim Harbaugh’s “brains and toughness as an underdog tactic” mantra from when Harbaugh was at Stanford -- and he oozes charisma. And he does things like this.

Marqise Lee (WR, USC, So.). As I’ve written a couple of times this season, we are all seduced by a certain type of player at a certain position, be it a big-hitting linebacker or safety, a golden-boy quarterback, or whatever. The position that does it for me the most is the do-it-all receiver, the guy who needs one block to take a short pass to the house and can burn you deep if you press him. In many ways, then, Lee has defined the 2012 season for me. For an incredibly disappointing USC team -- I tried to tamp down national title expectations before the season started, but I still assumed the Trojans would finish much, much better than 7-5 -- Lee has been the brightest ray of sunshine, catching 112 of 158 passes for 1,680 yards and 14 touchdowns and averaging 28.6 yards per kick return.

1. Marqise Lee is enough reason in and of himself. Seriously. He is so damn fun to watch.

Congratulations. You’ve made it through the Potato Bowl, the Meineke Car Care Bowl and a handful of other less than glorious postseason college football games. This week is when it gets good.

New Year’s Eve provides the best slate of bowl games to date, including a night cap between two teams ranked in the top 15. Let’s take a look at the best draft prospects in each game.

Iowa State and Tulsa will replay their season-opening clash on Jan. 31 at the Autozone Liberty Bowl in Memphis. Kickoff is scheduled for 3:30 p.m. ET, with television coverage on ESPN and streaming broadcast on WatchESPN. When the teams first met on Sept. 1 in Ames, Iowa State rallied from a 16-7 first quarter deficit to defeat Tulsa, 38-23.

The Iowa State Cyclones (6-6, 3-6) are playing in their third bowl in four seasons under coach Paul Rhoads. The Cyclones have fought quarterback controversy all season, using three different signalcallers. Junior Steele Jantz leads the team in almost all passing categories, but freshman Sam Richardson replaced Jantz in the season’s penultimate game against Kansas. Richardson started the finale against West Virginia and struggled, going 13-31 for 162 yards but managing three touchdown throws. Richardson will start the Liberty Bowl, and could become just the fourth quarterback in program history to win a bowl game.

As for the Yellow Jackets, their triple-option offensive attack led them to another mediocre season in the ACC. After dropping a heartbreaker in the 2011 Sun Bowl, they are looking to make a statement against another Pac-12 foe this time around. Georgia Tech features a losing record of 6-7, and they had to apply for a postseason waiver in order to make the game.

Most pundits feel USC will have their way against the Jackets and their inconsistent defense, but as From The Rumble Seat wrote, it appears Tech has begun making some adjustments to their defensive scheme in recent weeks.

Gary Klein of the Los Angeles Times and Rich Hammond of The Orange County Register watched Lee gingerly climb the steps of the team bus following practice:

Marqise Lee caught 112 passes in 2012, recording 1,680 receiving yards and 14 touchdowns. The sophomore wideout broke the 100-yard mark in eight of the Trojans’ 12 games this season. Lee won the Biletnikoff Award, given to the nation’s top collegiate receiver, and was briefly considered a Heisman Trophy dark horse after a 16-catch, 345-yard performance against Arizona Oct. 27. He also was named to the Walter Camp All-America team.

Weird things happen when a hypnotist shows up. Everything suddenly becomes a lot more funny than it really is, because you know people are suddenly acting silly when some guy in a bad vest snaps his fingers.

Also, booze is sometimes involved, and sometimes people flap their arms like they’re chickens while clucking loudly.

“EAT MORE CHIKIN,” boomed the cow jail guards, and it was not a marketing slogan centered around how funny it is that cows would prefer to not be killed. No chicken was to be served in cow jail or any other jail. CHIKIN is the output of a government program meant to engineer the cheapest possible protein substance. Inmates spend most of their meal times debating whether it’s fish or not.

Chick-fil-A is delicious, but there is no Chick-fil-A in cow jail or person jail. That’s one of the worst things about either kind of jail.

BYU -3 at San Diego State: The Aztecs’ run game has been very impressive this year... until one looks at the competition the Aztecs have faced. BYU’s offense is nothing special, but its defense is the truly elite unit in this game, and the reasonable price of -3 is too short to pass up.

East Carolina at Louisiana Lafayette -4.5 and Over 65: Lafayette is considerably better than East Carolina, and neither team plays much defense. Lafayette in a track meet, 45-30.