For a moment, let’s celebrate the Wyoming unit that was actually good in 2017

At around the 17:30 mark of this week’s set of Podcast Ain’t Played Nobody bowl previews, Steven Godfrey and I talked about Friday’s Potato Bowl in Boise, a.k.a. the Josh Allen Bowl.

Godfrey: Here’s the worst part about this whole situation. I know it’s gonna happen. It’s a weekday, daytime game, which means ESPN’s already gonna kneel on it in terms of “What kind of attention is this gonna draw?” And they’re gonna go all Josh Allen, all NFL, the entire damn game.

Bill: Oh god, yes.

Godfrey: You know they are.

Bill: And I’m already mad about it. ... he and his 126th-ranked passing offense [per S&P+] will get talked about the whole game, and it’s gonna be one of those super awkward situations. Look, I hope he has a great game, honestly, I’m tired of saying bad things about a guy I want to like. ... I hope he goes out and throws for about 500 yards because we’re gonna have to hear about it either way.

Every single time he makes a pass — just throws a pass to the sideline, an out route — we’re gonna hear about NFL arm strength. ... I’ve said it all already. It’s extremely unfair what we’ve done to him, it’s extremely unfair what scouts are currently doing to him, and I hope he makes a lot of money and figures it out in the pros.

Godfrey: Powder River.

Safe to say, we were right about the primary topic of conversation.

SB Nation’s Seth Galina posted a lovely piece on Allen, Wyoming’s mercurial starting quarterback, before Friday’s bowl game. In it, he basically says exactly what I believe: that Allen is a fun college quarterback who makes big throws and even bigger mistakes and has lots (and lots and lots and lots) to learn. But because he looks like the perfect NFL prototype quarterback — 6’5, 240 pounds, right arm chiseled out of granite — he can’t just be a super-flaky, super-fun college football player. He also has to be saddled by the “Future No. 1 pick?” label, too.

He didn’t handle that label well in 2017. He also struggled to adapt to a brand new set of skill position complements. After 2016’s Wyoming breakthrough (in which he still only produced a 145 passer rating with a Passing S&P+ ranking of 52nd), his production was mostly awful this fall. His season passer rating was below 125, and Wyoming indeed ranked a ghastly 126th in Passing S&P+, heading into the CMU game.

In Boise, I was hoping to see either the most incredible performance of Allen’s career or a performance so bad that the announcers were virtually forced to change topics.

We basically got the best quarter of Allen’s career, and that was enough.

After an incompletion on his first pass, Allen completed his next six passes for 104 yards and three touchdowns. It gave the Pokes a 21-7 lead. CMU would never get within two touchdowns the rest of the game, and Allen went into cruise control, completing just five of his last 12 passes for 50 yards.

In terms of passer rating, this ended up one of Allen’s best games. And it basically summed up Wyoming’s 2017 season narrative, in which a) Allen makes a couple of throws that make everybody drool and b) the defense does most of the work.

Wyoming’s defense was the reason the Cowboys were bowling for a second straight year. For the first time since Craig Bohl took over as head coach, Wyoming fielded a truly Bohl-level defense. The former North Dakota State head coach needed quite a while to put together the pieces he needed on that side of the ball, but in 2017 the Pokes improved from 96th to ninth in Def. S&P+. That’s insane.

Despite the offense cratering for much of the season — the Pokes averaged only 11 points per game in their losses — Wyoming finished 8-5 because the defense only once allowed more than 24 points all year.

Like every good Bohl defense at NDSU, they prevented big plays with aplomb, stuffed you in the red zone, and pounced on your impatience. They were led by two dynamite linemen (junior end Carl Granderson and sophomore tackle Youhanna Ghaifan), and an awesome spine of linebacker Logan Wilson and safeties Andrew Wingard and Marcus Epps.

Ghaifan was the star on Friday, with 2.5 tackles for loss, two sacks, and a forced fumble, but virtually everybody got involved, from Granderson (a sack and a fumble recovery) to Wilson (a forced fumble, an interception, and nine solo tackles) to Wingard (a TFL, an interception, and a forced fumble) to senior end Nela Lolohea (two sacks, one forced fumble).

Because of the early deficit, CMU was impatient from nearly the opening kickoff, and Wyoming pounced. And pounced and pounced and pounced. The Pokes forced eight turnovers and sacked poor quarterback Shane Morris five times. The Chippewas entered Wyoming territory six times and turned the ball over on four of those possessions.

This was a havoc fest, and it allowed Allen and the Wyoming offense to shift into third gear before the first quarter was even over.

We have another five months or so to yell about Allen, and yell we will. He still had stats that are drastically inferior to every QB we saw him compared to on Friday — from USC’s Josh Darnold to former Miami (Ohio) great Ben Roethlisberger — and he will remain the ultimate in scouts saying “I can fix those weaknesses!” because they’re hypnotized by That One Pass He Made. He will be saddled by life on a terrible NFL team (because when you’re picked in the top five or top 10, you’re probably getting picked by a bad team with 17 other weaknesses it still has to address), and he will almost certainly struggle for a while.

Maybe he’ll figure it out, and maybe he won’t. But for a moment, let’s celebrate Wyoming’s actual strength. That defense was absolutely dynamite this year, whether Youhanna Ghaifan can throw the ball a million miles or not, and it put on one hell of a show in Boise on Friday.

On Wednesday’s PAPN, I also talked about Ohio’s redemption opportunity. Frank Solich put his best Bobcat team yet on the field in 2017, but they blew it. After an 8-2 start that saw them rise higher than ever before in S&P+, they let Akron basically beat them twice. They fell by a field goal to the Zips in mid-November, then played hungover and lost at Buffalo as well.

They still had a chance for their first nine-win season since 2012, however, and they seized the opportunity.

UAB’s story is the best that college football produced in 2017. The Blazers went 8-4 in their first season back after having their program briefly killed, and Bill Clark deserved every National Coach of the Year vote anyone had. That he didn’t even finish in the AP’s top five was appalling.

That said, Ohio was the much better team in 2017, and the Bobcats proved it from virtually the opening kick. They were up 13 after one quarter, 24 after two, and 35 after three. Despite an injury to A.J. Ouellette, they ran the ball at will (Dorian Brown had 152 yards in just 12 carries), threw when they needed to, and snuffed out every UAB scoring chance short of the end zone. It was dominant. It was the Ohio we saw in October.

We’re apparently not allowed to watch competitive bowls this year; the average score of this week’s five weekday games was Winning Team 41, Losing Team 7. That’s disappointing, but let’s still take a moment to commend Temple for dragging itself into the land of the living this year.

In Geoff Collins’ first year as the Owls’ head coach, he inherited a roster in transition. Matt Rhule won the AAC in Philly last year, but a lot of the play-makers from that team were gone, and Temple had to craft a new identity. It took a little while. Eight games into the year, the Owls were 3-5 with wins over only Villanova, UMass, and ECU, and a home loss to UConn.

The offense gradually began to pick up steam under QB Frank Nutile, however. After averaging just 16 points per game in their first five contests, they averaged 31 in their last six. They won three of four to end the regular season, and Nutile threw for 254 yards in an easy Gasparilla Bowl win over FIU.

Granted, this game was doomed from the start; FIU quarterback Alex McGough threw only two passes before he was lost for the game with injury, and sophomore backup Maurice Alexander, who threw just six passes all year, never had a chance. He completed 16 of 33 passes and got picked twice and sacked seven times.

Temple cruised in a game that should have been much more competitive, but with the way the Owls were playing at the end of the year, they might have cruised even WITH McGough in the game.