This blog has been lacking a couple of regular winter features this year. One is a more in-depth celebration of the start of the ACC basketball season proper; that will start tomorrow with the traditional imbalanced schedule summary. The second is any coverage of the college bowl season whatsoever. I didn't intend for it to be like that - languishing in the to be edited fie is a dramatic post on how This Is The Year It All Changed, with a list of hypothetical events that would happen this December that would mark it as the turning point towards the acceptance of a college football playoff. But in the end, I just couldn't be bothered to care.

(As an aside, one of those points was going to be This is the year Pete Carroll started looking at job opportunities in the NFL, for after all, how fulfilling can your job be if the year-end reward is always an undermatched opponent in Pasedena? This I now realize from watching the Rose Bowl, will never happen. Southern Cal is doomed to an unending future of mediocre Big Ten teams in the Rose Bowl every year, but you can see from his face on the sideline that Pete Carroll absolutely loves it. And why wouldn't he? Trojan fans are never going to tire of Rose Bowl victories, and with the state of the Pac-10 and Big 10 going forward, he has a job security positively enviable in modern college football.)

I was interested in the UNC-West Virginia game, sure, but there wasn't much to write about besides "UNC is playing West Virginia." Few people outside of the two fanbases cared; it had been twenty-eight days since either team had taken the field, and winning the game would not change either team's season as a whole. Both would still be heading in the same directions they had all season, and beyond the contest of who would impress more, Pat White or Hakeem Nicks, there wasn't much to hold one's attention.

Nor did any of the other games appeal to me. I caught most of the aforementioned Rose Bowl down at one of D.C.'s finer drinking establishments at a friend's invitation, where, faced with the thought that I would actually have to root for one team or the other, I chose Southern Cal. It wasn't for any Trojan sympathies - spend time in Southern California and you get pretty sick of any USC-UCLA talk unless you have a vested interest, and USC maps to Duke in that particular rivalry anyway. No, I decided that my hatred for Jim Delany outpaced my interest in either team, and that I would like to see the Big 10 punished for as long as they cling to the Rose Bowl and remain the biggest impediment to a rational postseason. (I will, apparently, be hating on the Big 10 for quite some time.)

Now it's insanely stupid that the beliefs of a conference commissioner are the overwhelming inflamer of passion more a sporting event, and I realize this. And it just drains any remaining interest in the sport further out of me. The protest that Utah is being jobbed writes itself, but I can't be bothered to transcribe it. (They're undefeated and they weren't even allowed to... oh just read last year's rant and replace "Hawaii" with "Utah." Or gaze upon my prescience in August, where I used the wrong team from Utah as the example.) I couldn't tell you who played in most of the bigger games, and in the case of the ACC's Orange, neither could many other people. I was aware of bowl games this season, and surely walked by the TV while they were on, but couldn't tell you much about them. Rutgers beat State, right? And Maryland won their game. I know folks around here were excited about that.

That's what this football season as imparted on to me. In a year where football parity finally reached a stable equilibrium, with a bunch of excellent one-loss teams (and undefeated Utah) that in a normal world would lead to a hell of a postseason, I have and any joy just leeched out of me. This is The Year It All Changed, but for me, not the NCAA. Maybe I'll care if UNC jumps to these rarefied heights and I have skin in the game, maybe not. And if it does, I'll be throwing demands for a playoff around again (With one small difference: I know longer believe in the conference champion-only philosophy. This season has taught me that I want to see Texas and Texas Tech and Oklahoma fighting it out, and Virginia Tech and Cincinnati belong nowhere near it. Automatic bids were away to get conferences on board, and I no longer care if they want to kill their sport. I just don't.). But that could very well not happen, I could just drift away from college football altogether by December '09. There's the NFL, and conference basketball, and to step outside of sports, friends and family and holidays. College bowls are tiny, petty things ruled over by small, greedy, shortsighted people, and I just can't be bothered to care. There's the sound of rubber hitting hardwood to consider and merits decided on the court and not in the minds of voters. I don't think I'll be looking back.

I'm pretty sure when most fans were making their mental lists of "What Can Keep UNC From Going Undefeated?" losses at home did not often make an appearance. And I know Boston College, they of the 4-12 2007 conference record, wasn't often considered. And yet here we are, with a team that now exists beyond Tyrese Rice, and UNC's flawless season now pretty flawed.

The defensive performance was fine, comparable to the Maui invitational final against Notre Dame. The offense at times though, was, well, offensive. The perimeter game continued to unimpress - UNC hasn't hit more than a third of their three-point shots since Evansville, and if a team can keep the rest of the shots from falling as the Eagles did, the Heels aren't going to win wherever they are.

So what does this mean for Carolina? Obviously disaster, with a 1995 Duke-like winless conference season, mass firings of the coaching staff, collapse of the Dean Dome and a zombie apocalypse. Or a necessary wake-up call for a team that hasn't had to buckle down this season and a third-place ranking. But I'd still prepare for a zombie infestation, just in case. UNC gets a tune-up game against Charleston to work the kinks out before a trip to undefeated Wake Forest. The learning curve gets steeper from here on out, and it's disappointing that the Heels aren't further along than we all thought; now that the weaknesses have been exposed, perhaps the team can get to work on fixing them.

Let ACC conference play begin.

I have no idea what to say about this. Happily, I don't have to say anything. 

Hey, it's the other, copyright-infringing Wolf [space] pack! Consider it practice for Raleigh. And since it's in Reno:

An interesting note from the game: Rutgers, at every timeout, would haul five chairs - not Dean Dome chairs, but chairs they brought themselves - to inside the three point arc near the paint. There the team would sit, waiting for about a minute and a half while coach Fred Hill whispered to his assistants. Only after that consultation would he address the team, talking well into the end of timeout, while the Carolina players idled on the court, waiting for the Knights to get their act together. Of course, five guys sitting, sweating and drinking water well onto the court leaves a great deal of floor to be wiped, which required two towel kids, an equipment manager, a Smith Center employee and two members of the Rutgers staff to get the court back into playable condition, and even that didn't always work, as Ellington went down in that general area. Coming a game after Roy Williams expressed his displeasure at the work of the towel kids (hence the equipment managers at each basket) I can imagine he had to be frustrated.

Also, Marcus Ginyard toook the court for the first time this season and Tyler Hansbrough passed the 1,000 rebound mark, but neither of that is as important as the Rutgers' timeout habits.

Other thoughts:

• I can see a definite advantage to having Rutgers on the schedule as a late-December game. It exposes the team to the rough style of Big East play - and boy, was it rough - but not putting the team in to big of a risk for a loss.
• Of course, that might change, since Mike Rosario is very, very good. He has a really smooth shot for a freshman, and the 26 points he put up weren't to shabby.
• With 10 steals tonight, UNC is averaging 11.2 steals per game. That's two more a game than they were averaging at this point last season, and four more than last year in total. More on that later.

Ah, New Jersey. Any excuse to mention the Wrens. I'll be at the game; y'all are on your own.

Mr. Collins did a bad, bad thing in going to the GlaxoSmithKline Holiday Invitational this week, and Duke is self-reporting the violation to the NCAAs. Obviously, the program is hopelessly corrupt and should be given the SMU death penalty.

The NCAA's rules continue to surprise me. They picked three days, December 24th through 26th, and decided coaches can't watch high school basketball games? Unlike the rest of the year, when coaches can attend high school games but can't talk to the players, these three days are sacred? It's not like there isn't this miraculous invention called video, where such games could be recorded and watched on a separate date; I'd be surprised if every interested coach in the country weren't watching the games today on their magic picture-boxes. Is it some great quantum experiment, to see how the players react when they're not being observed? Is the NCAA just high?

Maybe they are; after all, an organization determined to see that athletes never see a dime of the money they're earning for the entire screwed up organization has no problem with the same student athletes being larded with corporate shopping sprees. The NCAA - where logic goes to die.

(But seriously, shut down Duke basketball.)