Thursday Night

North Carolina/Tennessee turned out to be a great game. Classic hard-hitting affair that reminds you how brutal the schedules are in the BCS conferences. These are mid-level teams who head hunt. Boise State and TCU just don't deal with this on a weekly basis. Maybe someday we'll see how they'd perform with that kind of challenge. Tennessee was a soft spot on the SEC schedules this year...not in the same kind of way that San Jose State or Colorado State is a soft spot.

NORTH CAROLINA 30, TENNESSEE 27 (in overtime)
Total Yardage: N. Carolina 385, Tennessee 339
Yards-Per-Play: N. Carolina 5.0, Tennessee 4.6
Passing Lines: N. Carolina 23-40-1-234, Tennessee 27-45-3-312
Turnovers: N. Carolina 2, Tennessee 3
Sloppiness: N. Carolina 27, Tennessee 33
Stat Score: N. Carolina 24, Tennessee 16

It was tied 20-all after 60 minutes, with turnovers even at two. The math says North Carolina should have won it then...but if you watched, you know they were VERY fortunate to even force overtime. Butch Davis mangled clock management in the final seconds to an extreme degree. Kids playing video games know not to run with no timeouts and not much time left. It's great to know that the next generation of coaches will have played thousands of hours of "Madden" and learned clock management.

Great atmosphere with a big pro-Tennessee crowd in Nashville. The Vols ended the season well, and clearly wanted to get a bowl win here. North Carolina developed an us-against-the-world mentality that not all bowl teams manage to find in time. Neither team is really that great, so they couldn't shake each other.

IF ONLY ALL BOWL DAYS WERE LIKE THIS!

Washington/Nebraska just went to the fourth quarter, and it's almost midnight CT. Will talk about that one in the first update tomorrow. Took me longer to get to blogging than I expected today...so let's just anticipate that for Friday. I'll aim to be here by dinner time to run some daytime numbers and Nebraska-Washington.

Oh, I mentioned this last week. For you NBA fans...I'm posting some NBA related stat-type stuff at www.hoopdata.com. Running today is a "catch up" article discussing a few themes from prior articles. If you're not into the NBA, you'll probably be bored. If you're into stat stuff in all sports...we'll see what develops...