COTTRELL COLUMN: ACC’s finest no match for SEC

Just when you think you can’t find anything else to make fun of the ACC about, they come up with brand new ways to be bad.

And Saturday may have been an all-time low.

Clemson and Georgia Tech, the two teams set to play in this week’s conference championship game, were all set to blow out their rivals, South Carolina and Georgia, since both are having pretty bad seasons.

It didn’t work out that way.

When your top teams can’t even beat middle-of-the-road SEC teams, your conference just isn’t good. Period. And let’s not even get into Florida State not even bothering to show up at Florida on Saturday.

Every week it seems to become more and more clear that the ACC doesn’t truly belong in the BCS picture, or, at the very least, if they do then the Mountain West Conference does as well.

Because, quite frankly, I’m beginning to think TCU might actually have the best team in the country this year.
RePete
Talk about squandering public sentiment.

After Pete Carroll and USC got all kinds of sympathy after Stanford and Jim Harbaugh ran up the score on them a few weeks ago, the Trojans decided to do the same to UCLA on Saturday.

You can argue semantics all you want about Bruins coach Rick Neuheisel calling a timeout, but the fact remains that Carroll decided to go deep for a touchdown when he didn’t have to.

With the Trojans still trying to salvage respectability this season with a big matchup with Arizona still remaining this weekend, don’t be surprised to see the football gods exact vengeance.
I’m Not Sayin’, I’m Just Sayin’
A new coach with a new system and a new attitude — and who was a somewhat questionable hire — has a program that had underachieved in recent years playing good football.

The offense is exciting. The defense isn’t all that great. The team has a few big wins over teams it maybe shouldn’t have beaten, and a loss or two to teams in games it should’ve won.

The coach also comes within an eyelash of beating a big rival on a collision course with the national championship game.

The future sure looks bright.

Sound like Auburn’s Gene Chizik?

No, it’s Notre Dame and Charlie Weis conventional wisdom circa Oct. 15, 2005.

The Irish gave Weis a huge contract extension after that near-miss against USC, and we’ve all seen how that’ll turn out.

Now I’m not saying that Chizik will suffer the same fate, or even something similar to it. He and his staff have done a magnificent job with the Tigers this season, and seem to have a solid foundation on which to build for the future.

But taking a close loss to a national championship contender — and in a rivalry game, no less — and equating it with certain glory in the future, as some fans and media members seem to be doing, can set up your fanbase for big disappointment.

Regardless, however, Chizik and the Tigers should be applauded for a great effort in Friday’s Iron Bowl loss to No. 2 Alabama.

Conference title time
While we all have been looking forward to Saturday’s 1 vs. 2, SEC Championship showdown between Alabama and Florida for a few weeks — and I’ll have more to say about this one later in the week — there are plenty of other juicy conference championship games this week, and even two de facto ones.

The two I’m most excited for — other than Bama-Florida, obviously — are the MAC championship between Ohio and Central Michigan on Friday and what amounts to the Pac-10 championship Thursday between Oregon and Oregon State.

For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of watching CMU quarterback Dan LeFevour over the last four years, by all means take advantage of the opportunity this week. The Chippewas are a fun team to watch, and Ohio has put together a fairly impressive season in its own right.

And raise your hand if you predicted the Civil War between the Ducks and Beavers would decide the Pac-10’s representative in the Rose Bowl.

Oregon has recovered well from its loss to Stanford, and OSU has been a fairly consistent team all season, something you couldn’t exactly say of the Beavers over the past few years.

Regardless, it’s bound to be a war in Eugene on Thursday night.
Tim Cottrell is sports designer of the Opelika-Auburn News. He will write a weekly column on college football during the season. You can also read him on the O-A Sports Blog at oanow.com. He can be reached at 737-2511 or .