I have an RSS feed set up for the UNC mentions of Fanblogs.com, which means once a month or so I'll see an article the vaguely involves UNC football - typically a list someone has put on a website somewhere about something I couldn't really give a damn about. And for the most part, I'm content to leave it like that.

What I was sent today, however, was coverage of a week-old story about how the ACC is in agreement to play in the as yet non-existent Congressional Bowl, in sunny Washington D.C.. I tossed "Congressional Bowl" and ACC into the magic Google to learn more... and nothing. Oh there were other mentions, but they all reflected back on the same source - an Annapolis sportswriters' blog. Don't these things usually have press releases?

Should it be true however, let me put my expert opinion as a six-month resident of D.C. out there for all your travelling planning. It's cold. Miserably, bitterly, I-miss-California cold. I'll be happy to go and see the Heels, but expect a week of complaints here afterwards about how I can still not feel various and quite important parts of my anatomy. Because again, cold.

(And for why UNC should be bowl eligible, I direct you to Sunday Morning Quaterback's early bit of optimism.

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Barack Obama comes out for the Heels. Just one of the, well, one advantage North Carolina gets for having a late primary. I'm wondering what his Illini constituents are thinking about this pick.

Is this really enough to overcome the incredibly poor decision to hire Reggie Love as your body man, however?

The great thing, of course, is that Edwards beat Obama in Horse - Carolina's dominance over Illinois continues.

(And for the record, Obama didn't get my primary vote. As a registered independent, the Maryland State Democratic Party deemed me unfit to vote in the first primary in my lifetime where my ballot would actually have weight. I'm still a little bitter about that.)

Update [2008-3-21 16:34:38 by TH]: UNC has swept the presidential field, with John McCain also picking the Heels, and Hiliary Clinton failing to release a bracket. North Carolina - the bipartisan basketball solution.

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Fanblogs.com points out that UNC has the most returning football starters in the ACC.

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Alternate title: Why the NCAA Doesn't Really Give a Damn About the Complaints of Hawaii, Missouri or Georgia Fans

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LSU jumped from seventh to second in the USA Today poll, jumping idle Georgia and Kansas, as well as Virginia Tech, as well as the two losing teams yesterday.

Now you can argue they shouldn't have been so low in the first place, but really, is there anything about that 21-14 game that suddenly made the Tigers that much better than they were before kickoff?

(I had forgotten they won, coming as it did on such a horrible UT interception, honestly. It seems to be that nobody really cared how everyone else was ranked as long as there was a surfiet of one-loss teams. But without them, everyone starts placing folks to get the game they wanted to see in August.)

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It's been a college football season were no win can be assured, no poll position can be defended and no one can agree on anything. Thanks to the wonderful system college football has kludged together, a bunch of voters will pick two names out of a hat, following which we'll be subjected to a month of debate over who should have been put where, and whether the criteria should be best season performance or best team right now, and calls for playoffs, and diatribes about how playoffs will ruin the sancity of college football, America, and talking heads everywhere. And through all of this babble, bickering and bile there will be only one thing everybody agrees on. Just one indisputable belief that everyone trying to fix college football will hold sacrosanct:

The only undefeated team in the country has no business playing for the national championship.

The voters thinks so. The computer formula think so. The guys getting paid in 800-word chunks think so. Even the team itself isn't aiming that high -Brennan's highest hope is a Rose Bowl appearance. Folks are casting around a collection of two-loss also-rans to find championship contenders while the only team with an unblemished record is barely cracking the Top 10.

Put aside what you know about Hawaii for a moment. Think about every sport, every league, every way of awarding a trophy in existence on this planet, and find one where you can defeat every opponent put in front of you and not get a chance to play for the championship. College football and maybe the games six year-olds with over protective parents play - those are the only placesthis can happen. Hawaii never lost. Only two teams in the country came within one game of accomplishing that (and one of them won't be sniffing the end-of-year hardware either). Instead, we're going to the collection of two-loss teams to find our champion.

Hawaii puts to lie the most traditional reason for excluding undefeated teams from the BCS, the schedule. Who wants to play Hawaii? Michigan State backed out of their game at a cost of $250,000. The Warriors are a member of the only conference that will have them; the Pac-10 isn't knocking on any doors in Manoa. Half of their conference left in 1999 in no small part because of the expense of travelling across three time zones. Another five schools have left since then - Hawaii is the oldest member of the conference by seventeen years.

Let me make this perfectly clear. No one will play this team. Michigan turned them down. So did USC. Urban Meyer at Florida went on record about ho little he wanted to play this team:

Florida has aready scheduled a Colt Brennan-less team to fly to Gainesville next year. Folks can complain about the expense of travelling to Hawaii all they want, but they'll still play the Hawaii Bowl and they'll still line up for the Maui Invitational in basketball. They just won't play June Jones' team.

The fix was in from the day the schedules were released; Hawaii wasn't going to be playing for a national championship. This is absolutely the best outcome the Warriors could have hoped for, with no other undefeated teams and only two one-loss squads, one of which did not even get the chance to play for its conference championship. This is the best season ever for a team outside the BCS conferences to make the championship game, and as recently as yesterday is was in doubt if the team would make a major bowl.

Before Hawaii took the first snap of the 2007 football season, it had already been decided they were out of championship contention. It's not right and it's not fair.

It's college football.

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Georgia Tech athletic director Dan Radakovich really likes his football coach:

Chan Gailey had a record of 44-32 (28-20 in the ACC) over six seasons, with as many bowl appearances. The coach he replaced had a record over the same period of 45-25 (32-16). He too, was fi- no wait, he was hired away by that always-willing-to-settle institution, Notre Dame. It's good to know the line between success and failure is four games in conference.

Also thrilled with his coach? Joe Alleva:

And times like this, it's nice to hear from a former coach, who knows how to fire someone gently:

Callahan (27-22) replaced also fired Frank Solich (58-19) in 2004. Early signs point to Nebraska hiring one of two Solich assistants who interviewed for the head job four years ago:

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"When Duke and Carolina meet on the football field you can throw away the records." Woody Durham must have said that four or five times before the game today. What went unsaid was the fact that both teams usually wanted to throw the records away - it had been ten seasons since either team had a winning record coming into the game, and only once in the last twenty-five had both teams gone into the matchup above 0.500. The fact that the last couple of games have been nailbiters speaks more to the futility on both sides of the ball than any heat in the rivalry.

The entire game can be neatly summed up by the first play from the line of scrimmage - a poorly timed man in motion caused Yates to bobble the snap, and when he regained control he was immediately greated by three rushing Blue Devils, who promptly committed a face mask penalty, giving UNC 15 yards. The teams were going ut of their way to lose this game. No one could tackle. Yates threw two interceptions - which Duke could not capitalize on - and at least three more passes off the hands of defensive backs. At one point in the fourth quarter, all of UNC's penalties had been personal fouls after the play had been whistled dead. Brandan Tate was showing incredibly poor judgement in the punts he decided to field, on one occasion fumbling after being hit, only to recover and gain fifteen yards.

All of this, of course, was negated by the three fied goals missed by Duke, including a game winner to end regulation, and one in overtime that took what little wind the Blue Devils had remaining out of their sails. The game was less won and more conceded out of despair.

It is better than a loss of course, which would have completely erased the goodwill Davis has built up this season. (As it was, the raise drew quite a few comments from fans at the game. An extra 200K shoud at least get the fans a haftime lead over 1-10 schools from Durham.) It's almost ironic to end a season of close losses the Heels weren't expected to compete in with a close win they should have dominated, but at this point I think everyone's ready to put the entire sport aside and focus on basketball. I know I am.

Oh, and the women's soccer team lost as well. Happily, it will be after midnight on the East Coast by the time the basketball game in Las Vegas ends, so maybe they won't be dragged down by this horrible day.

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Brief notes as I head out to Kenan for he Victory Bell game - my first game in Chapel Hill in seven years:

• John Gasaway (of Big Ten Wonk fame) has an excellent article on the lack of respect given to UNC's basketball defense every year. It's nothing new if you've been following the tempo-free statistics in recent year, but it summarizes everything very well and is a good thing to have under your belt when the commentators start whining about the number of points UNC allows come February.

• Caulton Tudo doesn't like Butch Davis' pay raise. Neither does Bill Friday. Or Dane Huffman. Is Butch Davis being paid too much? In the extend that pretty much every head coach in D1 football and basketball is paid too much for teaching kids push a ball around a field or court, then yes, of course he's paid too much. But that's society's priorities being too far out of whack. In this case, journalists seem to be projecting a lot onto a skittish university's desire to keep their coach - if you remember correctly, the last succesful coach left for Texas despite an offer of a salary match, and don't think Dick Baddour won't overreact to avoid that happenning again. I'm still amazed sports seem to be the only profession where the press routinel criticizes workers for successful getting a pay raise. They sure as hell don't seem to do the same for CEO's.

• Question - do we revel in the Wolfpack missing a bowl game as well or bemoan the fact UNC lost to this team?

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Today's N&O had a little editorializing in the sports pages:

I was a bit put out upon reading this. After all, in my euphoric post-field hockey haze, I had heard nothing about Davis leaving. So I quickly skimmed through ACC Now for the relevant backstory. Which was entirely contained in two posts:

Could UNC's Davis get a contract extension?

and Davis has no comment on possible contract extension

The University has a policy - one shared by practically every educational institution, corporation, and rational person who hires another rational person in the world - you don't talk about what you would hypothetically pay some one. And yet Giglio is criticizing Davis for something that may or may not be happening?

We've all sat through three coaching searches in the last year and a half - one at UNC and two down the road in Raleigh - and if there's one thing that's perfectly clear, it's that it's not hard to speculate about potential new coaches. Just compare the current folks in the coaching world with a school's alumni rolls and its athletic department budget and bam! You've just cracked the case of the next coach, Encyclopedia Brown. Remember, there were times when large numbers of people thought Rick Barnes or Bill Cowher would be coming to State. Hell, check out this post four days before Tom O'Brien left BC and see whose name isn't mentioned.

So would Arkansas like to have Butch Davis as their head coach? Almost certainly. Of course, the Razorbacks haven't actually fired their current coach yet. So they can't ask for permission to talk to UNC's, which means both Dick Baddour and Butch Davis have... nothing to say on the subject. And yet the N&O is pissed that they're not actually saying anything.

Would I like Davis to disavow ever leaving UNC? Well frankly, I've heard that before, and don't really need to hear it now. I can't see Davis leaving after a year unless the circumstances are truly extraordinary, and don't really care what Baddour and Davis are or aren't doing, outside of preparing for Duke. There's a Victory Bell on the line, after all. For sufficiently small values of "on the line" at least.

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Four fumble recoverys by the UNC defense. Three snaps from the Georgia Tech one that didn't result in a score. The seventh Tar Heel loss this season by a touchdown or less.

Aaugh, indeed.

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The closest thing Mash on the Gas could find to a hot UNC alumnus is a Fox News anchor? There's got to be a better selection than that, right?

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