Before the holidays, I had heard as much as I could stand about Hawaii and how they deserved a shot at the National title due to their undefeated season and their "prolific" offense.  I offered a TD to  make the point that they were a paper tiger and provided supporting arguments to that effect.  In fact, I was of the opinion that the team that actually got screwed was Georgia, not Hawaii. I lost that TD to rstowe who countered with some very good arguments however, every point I made came to be.

Take a look: http://www.fannation.com/throwdowns/show/91280

I am a baseball coach for a D-1 program and while we are talking about a different sport, evaluating opponents on the schedule happens in a very similar fashion. The first thing we do is throw out all the garbage that the public is fed by the huge sports media and all of their so called "experts."  It is in their best interest to talk teams up, find "cinderella" stories and create a public buzz. This gets us all to not only tune into the game but hawk all thier pregame shows and any other of a myriad of sports programming they can come up with.  If you watched the Georgia-Hawaii game you might have noticed that even after the Bulldogs had blown the game wide open, the announcers were shamelessly attempting to convince us that what we were seeing was somehow an oddity and not the total beating that it most certainly was.  Our coaching staff uses statistics, quality of schedule, talent pools and lists of "facts" that are available for evaluations. We do this to formulate our game plans, set up our pitching rotations etc. We don't, of course, talk down teams on our schedule to our players that we feel are inferior as that is the quickest way to get yourself a ASU/Michigan debacle.

My point is, no matter what the ESPNs, Fox Sports, etc of the world try to tell us, sometimes it is, what it is! In this case, Hawaii was in fact an inferior team from an inferior conference.  That said, I take my hat off to them for a great season and a heroic effort last night. They didn't give up even after being domintated and punished for 3 and 1/2 quarters. That is admirable and they should be proud of themselves and the season they put together.

I am neither a Georgia or SEC fan. It is simply that I understood that Georgia was a very good team in a great football conference and could not understand why more people couldn't see the potential for the drubbing that occured last night!