Don't have a rooting interest in today's football game? Happily, I can just republish what I wrote the last time the Colts hit the Super Bowl:

I am by no means a faithful Colts fan - you'll want to go here if that's what you're looking for - but I, and most of the folks at the party I was attending, were cheering on the Indianapolis contingent. Part of that was because I actually like Peyton Manning. I figure if you're going to be that talented and that wealthy, you at least should have the common courtesy to be incredibly goofy, which Manning is. But mainly I chose the team to cheer for on Sunday the same way I often pick sides in professional games I don't have an interest in. I root for the team with the most UNC alumni.

This year that was the Colts, with starting center Jeff Saturday. And it's worth pointing out that the same guy who bashed Saturday a couple of weeks ago in Slate has credited the center with the Colts' Super Bowl victory.

(Saturday is apparently Slate's new poster boy, as frequent contributer Gregg Easterbrook thinks he's the most valuable player in the NFL. Unfortunately, Gregg Easterbrook is wrong about pretty much everything he writes outside of football, so I never know how much faith to put in his NFL thoughts. But congratulations, nonetheless.)

Saturday is still under center for the Colts, and has now been to four pro bowls and is on the Executive Committee for the NFLPA. Not bad for a guy who went undrafted and was cut from the first team that signed him before the season started.

Albany is 4-9 against an Albany-worthy schedule; UNC has been running two-a-days to work out Roy Williams' frustrations. This will not be pretty.

And so the season ends, not with a bang but with an offsides call.

I really thought UNC had a win in this one, their third try at a Charlotte bowl game. The first half had been rough, with Dion Lewis already managing over a hundred yards rushing, but a missed field goal and a goal line fumble had kept the Heels in the game, and they were only down 13-10. The third quarter had gone extremely well; after giving up a field goal on what ended up being an eleven yard scoring drive, Carolina put together a seventy-yard drive of their own to take the lead. They followed it up by shutting down a Pitt drive with three straight gets on the quarterback. Carolina entered the fourth quarter with the lead, the ball, and the momentum. They'd solved the riddle of Dion Lewis and they'd disrupted the passing game to stop the short passes underneath to Mike Shanahan that were killing them earlier. They had the game in hand.

Until they didn't. Pitt got the ball back on their own 5, and proceeded to give the ball to Lewis for ten of their next thirteen plays, watching him rack up 49 of his 159 yards and put the Panthers on the cusp of field goal range. And there they stood, on the UNC 30 with 1:55 to play, and instead of kicking they baited the Heels offsides. And not just one player – I'm pretty sure three of them made the jump. It was a masterful call, and Pitt burned another minute of clock and two Tar Heel timeouts before getting their three points. A better team could take the 0:56 remaining and get their own field goal in return. UNC was not that team, getting eleven yards in eight plays, and that was the ball game.

All in all, it was the game everyone expected. Dion Lewis got his huge numbers, while the UNC defense did as well as could be expected. Mike Shanahan's five receptions were about four too many, but Greg Little's 108 total yards and two touchdowns were more than enough compensation. If anything killed the Heels, it was the field position they gave the Panthers. Only twice did Pitt start inside their own 30; the aforementioned winning drive, and a goal line interception of Yates that started them on their own 3. Three scoring drives for 13 points started in UNC territory, on the Carolina 40, 45, and 35. Push the Panthers back and give the UNC defense more room to work with, and it's a different game.

In the end, UNC sends another class off with a bowl loss, their third straight. Sure, the Heels return a fair number of players and should compete quite well in the ACC. But the offense can't be as moribund as they were this season, or 2010 will be just as frustrating as 2009.

Go out and win some car parts!

Possibly the best one-paragraph preview of the Car Care Bowl to date:

A criminal defense attorney of my longstanding acquaintance has what he calls his "Joyce Kilmer defense" whenever a client of his is charged with manufacture of a controlled substance with respect to marijuana. His argument is that, while a guy running a meth lab is engaged in the manufacture of an illegal drug, a guy who's growing pot plants isn't "manufacturing" anything, because "only God can make a tree." Anyone who appreciates the distinction between a Hamiltonian affinity for manufacturing and a Jeffersonian devotion to agrarianism (as exemplified in the prose of the Vanderbilt Fugitives, the poetry of Wendell Berry, and the film "The Dukes of Hazzard") recognizes that he is right, which brings me to the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate bowl games. Bowls named after plants (Rose, Orange, Sugar, Cotton) or after animals that are raised on a farm (Chick-fil-A) are good bowl games. (Admittedly, the aforementioned Poinsettia Bowl undermines this argument.) The Meineke Car Care Bowl generally is a clear example of the fact that bowls named after factory-produced goods or the retailers who sell them tend to be crummy contests. That said, a showdown between Pitt and UNC should make for a better game than most, and I have learned my lesson. Siding with Dave Wannstedt in a meaningful game is like getting involved in a land war in Asia; it's one of the classic blunders. Accordingly, I'm picking the Tar Heels. After all, we are dealing with tobacco-growing Southern agrarians doing battle with steel-welding Eastern industrialists.

I'd quibble with the argument that the waffle fries at Chick-fil-A are any less a factory-produced good than the oil filters Meineke sells, or any tastier, for that matter, but call it by it's true name the Peach and it holds. I've now seen UNC play in three different automobile related bowls – the Carquest, the Continental Tire and now the Meineke – and I've never been particularly enraptured.

Also, putting the proud tradition of the North Carolina Tar Heels on the same side as the man who created his own Johnny-come-lately university up the way in Charlottesville are fighting words where I come from.

They never met as head coaches in the NFL. By the time the Dolphins and the Browns met in 2004, both teams had fired their respective head coaches earlier that season.

Davis, of course, was the defensive line coach under defensive coordinator Wannstedt at Dallas from 1989 to 1992, succeeding him at the coordinator position once Wannstedt took the head coaching job in Chicago. The Bears never played Dallas during Davis' tenure there either. You can safely assume both coaches are familiar with each other's defensive schemes.

In addition to my yearly bowl malaise, there's been another thing keeping me from getting amped up about today's Car Care Bowl – the fact that I'm actually pretty fond of Pittsburgh. I like the city. I enjoy wandering the Strip District, I've liked my time spent on the Pitt campus, and I've picked up quite a few friends from the area who, once you ween them off Iron City, are damn fun people to share a beer with. None of them are headed to Charlotte, of course, as most of the Yinzers are more preoccupied with the Steelers' miserable season than the Panther's good one, but I'll get a barrage of text messages after the game no matter who comes out on top.

So how's the team? First of all, they lost to N.C. State. What kind of respectable football team loses to a school as bad as.. oh. The State game was the outlier in what was otherwise a very predictable season. Pitt beat every other unranked team they faced and lost both of their marquee games, by three to West Virginia and by one to Cincinnati. They're somewhere between first and third in pretty much all offensive and defensive categories, which is indicative if nothing else of the drop-off in Big East talent after the first three teams. There are a couple of things they do particuarly well, though:

• They get to the quarterback. The Panthers lead the nation in sacks, averaging 3.75 a game. (UNC's defense, no slouches themselves, only pull the QB down 2.5 times a game.) And while Carolina's offensive line isn't as tissue-thin as it was during the worst of the season, it's still nothing to write home about, and we've all seen the mistakes a harried T.J. Yates can make. The Heels are going to need most of their offensive trickery on hand to keep Pitt from just blitzing more often than not.
• Dion Lewis can run the ball. He's third in the country in yards per game, and he's a freshman. Now, UNC can shut down a running game, and only two player have managed 100 yard games against the Heels this season – Jonathan Dwyer, who ran for 158 and, of all players, Virginia's Mikell Simpson, who managed 100 even. Dwyer isn't of the same caliber as Lewis, although the Pitt offense is more conventional than Tech's, and Carolina can stop  runners between the tackles very well. They'll have to. Because even if you can reduce the Panthers to a one-dimensional passing game...
• ... Jonathan Baldwin will get his yards. Baldwin has 54 receptions for 90 yards a game, and he's only a sophomore. On top of that, he steps it up in big games, pulling down a full half of his scores in the last three weeks against Notre Dame, WVU and Cincinnati. The other big threat to catch it in the end zone is the senior tight end, Dorian Dickerson, who has been quiet in the last three weeks, but was a reliable scoring option before that.

The defense has a tall order in this game, because at this point we all know what the offense is capable of, and it's not much. It's T.J. Yates' last game in a Tar Heel jersey, (no idea what I was thinking there) and UNC really needs the calm, capable Yates that only occasionally shows up, most notably against Virginia Tech. The defense can't be hung out to dry like they so often are. I, for one, don't want to deal with the text messages.

It's being reported that Mike Paulus is transferring to William & Mary to finish out his remaining two years. His career at UNC as nasty, brutish, and short, first coming into prominence replacing an injured T.J. Yates last season against Virginia Tech only to lose the game and his spot on the depth chart to Cam Sexton. His final statistical line? 4-13 for 33 yards and two interceptions. 

Paulus, of course, was recruited by Bunting at the expense of Russell Wilson. Ironically, State fans were attempting at the time to poach Paulus away with their own coach hiring, also one presumes, at the expense of Russell Wilson.