Baylor vs. North Carolina, 2015 Russell Athletic Bowl results: Banged-up Bears break records

The end of Baylor’s regular season would have had anyone at a loss. It’s one thing to lose your starting quarterback. It’s another to lose your backup. It’s another to ask your third-stringer, a part-time receiver, to throw passes in an incredible rainstorm (against TCU). It’s another to lose that third-stringer and ask a full-time receiver to take snaps.

Even Alabama, with that amazing defense, would struggle to win with its fourth-string quarterback.

It’s impressive enough to be historically good at one football thing. In the past year, Baylor has been historically impressive at two.

In last year’s Cotton Bowl, Baylor squared off against Michigan State’s run-stuffing defense. Art Briles had a solution: don’t run. He had an NFL quarterback in Bryce Petty and two wide receivers worthy of double coverage in Corey Coleman and KD Cannon.

Remember how Ohio State overcame two quarterback injuries last year? No. 17 Baylor had to deal with about double that along the way to its fourth 10-win season in five years, capping with a 49-38 win over No. 10 North Carolina in the Russell Athletic Bowl.

The Bears broke the bowl’s rushing record ... in the first half, with 358. They put up the most rushing yards an Art Briles team ever had ... in the first half. (That’s saying something. Despite the popular assumption, Baylor runs all the time. The Bears ranked No. 4 in the country in rushing attempts per game before this one.)

UNC is losing to a team that literally played five different QBs in the first quarter. Five! And three of them were running backs! Need a meme for that? UNC fans and players just gave you a lot of material.

Computer ratings are good for telling us something about a team’s overall season. In a lot of cases, they are intended to be predictive. My own S&P+ has been successful enough to use predictively. But funky things happen to a rating’s predictive capabilities when team personnel changes.

With Seth Russell at quarterback, Baylor was perhaps the most consistent team in the country. Against opponents both good at bad, the Bears’ average percentile performance averaged 90 percent through seven games; six of the seven games were between 86 and 91 percent. That’s not quite elite, but it’s elite consistency.

Clemson beat North Carolina in the ACC Championship Game, so to honor a bet with South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, North Carolina governor Pat McCrory put a Clemson flag up in his office ... with a twist. He also put a referee’s uniform on his desk in homage to a bad offsides call that ruined the Tar Heels’ chance of an upset.

At least Clemson won this bet. Last season, former Tigers running back C.J. Spiller had to wear a Florida State shirt after a lost bet.

Bowl season is upon us, which means the careful and thought-out ranking of the gifts players will receive. Some bowls did very well and deserve our applause. Others might as well have not shown up.

Congratulations to the following bowl games that both show an understanding of what college-aged kids want and give them some swag for a hard-fought year.

The Russell Athletic Bowl has had many names in its 25 years of existence, including the Tangerine Bowl for a short period, but settled into its current sponsorship in 2012 and will host the Big 12 and ACC again.

Originally named the Blockbuster Bowl, the game became the Carquest Bowl, MicronPC Bowl and Tangerine Bowl before becoming the Russell Athletic Bowl. The new title sponsorship hasn’t had the luck of good games recently, though. The margin of victory for Louisville and NC State in the last two years was 61 points, combined.