The Illini are going to the Rosebowl! Yeah!

For the longest time, it seems like my college football team would always be a disappointment. It even came to the point where we didn’t even care to watch the games, knowing that they’d lose. But this year, they beat Penn State….then they beat Wisconsin in an awesome game. We got pretty excited. Then THE game - against Ohio state. My former company (which got bought by X Inc), Company X, is located in Columbus, and one of my current coworkers had “OSU #1!” on his IM status message. So when we beat OSU, I didn’t hesitate to bring it up when I was on a conference call with the Ohio group. It was nice to rub it in a little!

I can’t say I understand the BCS system or feel that it’s really fair, but this year, I don’t mind it too much. Luckily the Rose Bowl has a relationship with Big Ten teams and Ohio State made it to the BCS Championship, which gave us the Rose Bowl chance. Unfortunately, several higher ranked teams didn’t get a chance at a bowl game because of how the weird rules/picking works.

“The Illini finished 13th in the final BCS ratings, and the top 14 are eligible for BCS games. The Rose Bowl passed on No. 6 Missouri, No. 8 Kansas, No. 9 West Virginia, No. 10 Hawaii and No. 14 Boston College. No. 5 Georgia was protected for the Southeastern Conference’s relationship with the Sugar Bowl after LSU made it to the title game, and No. 10 Florida of the SEC was ineligible because rules bar three teams from one conference getting to a BCS game.
Unlikely Illini season to end in Rose Bowl

So congrats to the Illini and good luck to them in Pasadena. We’ll be watching for sure!

…and congrats go to Hawaii as well, for having a perfect season and heading to the Sugar Bowl. We’ll definitely be watching that one, just because they’re an awesome team and we’re hoping to see a lot of brown faces in the audience!

This entry was posted on Monday, December 3rd, 2007 at 8:54 am and is filed under I Like Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.