Houston Cougars Vs. Tulsa Golden Hurricanes (11/7/09)

I am an intermittent college football fan. This means that, come Saturday, whether or not the television is on college football depends entirely on whatever kind of mood I'm in (not to mention whether or not there is any hockey on). Well let's just say that, mainly thanks to the Cincinnati Bearcats, on the night of November 7th, I decided I'd see what the Bearcats could do against the UConn Huskies.

The game was exciting, with Cincinnati's 30-10 halftime lead slowly evaporating with each passing minute. First it was UConn's running back Jordan Todman running 45 yards up the gut to cut the lead to thirteen. Then it was Robert McClain returning a punt 87 yards for a touchdown to re-cut the lead to thirteen following a Bearcats TD.

Then the fourth quarter came, and all hell broke loose. When all was said and done, UConn refused to go away, but ultimately ended up falling to the undefeated Bearcats by a final score of 47-45.

However, as exciting as the Cincy game was, there was another game going on around the same time that had caught my attention. It was the matchup between the Houston Cougars and the Tulsa Golden Hurricane. I am a fan of underdogs, you see, and it's not too often that there are two underdogs within the same game: Houston, ranked 13th in the nation but receiving virtually no love from the media, who is focused, as always, on the "big schools", and Tulsa, who was 4-4 and unranked going in to the game, against the 7-1 Cougars.

But despite the fact it was perhaps the wildest finish of the entire college football gameday, I was forced to follow the game in the worst way imaginable: Via the sports ticker. Despite the fact Tulsa went up 45-37 with just over three minutes left, which would have certainly been put on "upset alert" and would have followed with a highlight or two had it been a nationally-acknowledged team, the Cincy-UConn game went on as if nothing happened. Nor was there any mention when Houston drove down the field, and scored a touchdown with :21 remaining in the game, only to fail on the two-point conversion, an incident that surely wrapped up the win for Tulsa. The only mention of any of this featured in small, barely-readable letters scrolling along at the bottom of my 32" television screen as if hiding from less acute viewers.

So imagine my reaction when, just as the word "Final" appeared next to the game, Houston's score jumped from 43 to 46, with more scrolling letters revealing that Houston had kicked a 51-yard field goal to win the game, 46-45. What? Are you kidding me? Could ABC not find time at the end of a quarter, or right after a commercial break, to at least mention something about that game? I know they certainly found lots of time to bludgeon viewers with talk of the same upsets and near-upsets: Northwestern beat previously undefeated Iowa, Stanford steamrolled Oregon, Alabama defeated LSU, but they couldn't find time to mention that a top-25 team had just avoided a huge upset? Usually, these are the kinds of things that are repetitively beaten into the collective mind frame of all those watching, but apparently that's only if the top-25 team is a nationally-acknowledged university with a consistent-winning record, instead of a smaller school that hasn't been in the top-25 since 1991.

Despite its ridiculous outcome, which saw Houston come back from an eight-point deficit by scoring nine points in under 30 seconds, there was no mention of it on the NBC telecast I was watching, nor was there any mention of it on the front page of any of the major sports websites the next day (Yahoo! or ESPN).

There are so many stories about how the BCS is a failure to all of mankind that I will resist turning this article into yet another one. But if the BCS will not acknowledge teams like Houston, then the media at least should. Would it have hurt the school to at least get a mention on a nationally-aired telecast? Promoting and encouraging the small schools would go a long way in at least restoring some dignity, however small, to a system that is so severely flawed that it becomes nothing more than a parody of itself.