Kentucky vs. Georgia Tech, TaxSlayer Bowl 2016: Schedule, scores, and more

The ACC’s gone from being the Power 6/5’s “basketball conference” to being 2016’s best football league, having two national champions in four years, setting a new conference bowl season record (9-3), winning the Heisman and the Piesman, potentially having three or four top-10 NFL draft picks, and so forth.

So fun facts like the one in the headline will probably continue for a while.

When Major League Baseball installed a one-game wild card playoff before the actual playoffs, it brought out critics (yours truly included) who complained that a single-game elimination goes against the spirit of the sport. Everything in baseball involves multiple games, and building the randomness of a single game into the structure seemed unfair.

Everything in football is single-game. It is a logistical necessity, and it bakes an extra layer of chaos into the pie. There is no best-of-seven, and there is no coming back from a slow start or a 3-1 deficit.

Georgia Tech beat Kentucky in the TaxSlayer Bowl on Saturday afternoon, giving the Yellow Jackets a 9-4 record for 2016. After the 33-18 victory over the Wildcats, GT head coach Paul Johnson made a hilarious and true statement about how his team has fared against SEC East opponents.

Georgia Tech will face Tennessee to open the 2017 season in Atlanta. The other two wins over SEC East opponents for Georgia Tech include Georgia, who they beat 28-27 to close out the regular season, and Vanderbilt. The Yellow Jackets beat Vandy earlier in the season, 38-7.

Leave it to Paul Johnson to engineer this level of ruckus during a relatively meaningless TaxSlayer Bowl game against Kentucky, which the Jackets won 33-18.

Things started off chippy, with Johnson and Kentucky’s Mark Stoops jawing in the middle of the field during the first quarter after a Wildcats player went down injured.

Typically when teams line up to go for it on fourth down in an obvious not-so-advantageous position of the field, it’s just to bark a dummy cadence. Maybe you can draw the other team offside and get an easy first down, if not just call a timeout and punt the ball.

Paul Johnson’s desires are ... unconventional:

In the first quarter of the TaxSlayer Bowl, Kentucky head coach Mark Stoops and Georgia Tech head coach Paul Johnson got into a shouting match after a couple of Wildcat defensive injuries on consecutive plays:

At issue: whether these were cut blocks or chop blocks. There’s a big difference. The former is a legal block below the waist. An illegal chop block is a low block against a defender who’s already being blocked up high by somebody else. This is an endless debate when it comes to run-option offenses like Johnson’s.

Georgia Tech and Kentucky both went about it somewhat under the radar and put together relatively strong years. The Yellow Jackets weren’t in the Clemson-Louisville-Florida State class of the ACC, but they won eight games and beat rival Georgia.

The Wildcats were supposed to be one of the worst teams in the SEC, and instead they went a respectable 4-4 in conference play and 7-5 overall. They had a completely solid season in a year that featured much of their division crumbling around them.

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College football bowl games are a different beast for bettors. Sure, the typical handicapping elements apply. Offense and defense matter. But there are some key elements at play that don’t apply as much during the regular season.