Pitchin with Pritch: Bowl games and basketball games galore

The past couple of weeks have been pretty enjoyable! First of all, Christmas and the family coming back home from Lincoln-—we got to spend a couple of days with all of them. That was the best part of the break but another good thing was the fact that there were a multitude of football and basketball events that took place.

Plus, we still have one more pretty big football game coming up on the 13th of January when the National Championship game will be played.

From Dec. 20 through Jan. 13, there will have been 40 postseason bowl games played. That is a lot of football in a pretty short period of time. 

There were really good games to watch and then there were the “how did they get to a bowl game,” games. Before the playoff system was put into place, if your team could get to a bowl game played on New Year’s Day, then you were in the “big time” grouping. 

Now, I am not too sure what is considered the Blue Bloods of bowl games. The way things are set now, the Fiesta Bowl and the Peach Bowl were the play-in bowls to get to the national championship game—so they would be considered pretty important. 

Then there were the Sugar, Rose, Orange, and Cotton Bowl games where all the teams that made those probably are considered by most people to be some of the best in college football. 

There were some pretty good teams that didn’t make any of those games. Take Alabama for instance. They have been in the championship group almost every year until this year and they didn’t make any of those bowl games. 

Another interesting fact—nine of the 14 teams in the Big 10 were in bowl games. The Big 10 is a pretty competitive conference in a lot of sports. They won some of the bowl games and lost some. 

Michigan and Alabama had an interesting game in that it was one of those where personally I wouldn’t have cared if neither team would have won the game. 

With less than a minute left to play, Alabama had the game won. In most cases, coaches would just have their quarterback take a knee, but not Coach Sabin. 

He went for the score to make it 35-16 instead of 28-16. I know that the other team still has the option to play defense, but still Sabin didn’t make the call to kneel.

On the other hand, if the situation had been reversed, I am not sure the Michigan coach wouldn’t have done the same thing. Anyway, one more big game and the national championship will be a done thing!

Let’s talk basketball

There was a lot of basketball played during this time also. Although I watched a lot, there were only a couple of games I was particularly interested in when it was all said and done. 

I have just a few teams that I truly follow and those are Nebraska, Kansas and Creighton. I do watch for Fort Hays scores, but you don’t find them on TV. 

Creighton might be the best team in the state of Nebraska. The Bluejays played Marquette on TV and what looked like on paper might be a really close game turned into a blowout by Creighton. The final score was 92-75 but it wasn’t that close. 

Creighton substituted the last couple of minutes and gave up about 10 straight unanswered points. Before that, they pretty much took a game that was close at half time and ran downhill with it.

Creighton shoots pretty well, loves the three-point line, and is playing better defense than they were earlier in the season. They were 33 for 66 from 2-point, 9 for 29 from 3 and 7 for 8 at the free-throw line. 

Marquette picked up a transfer from Nebraska in Ed Morrow and the Huskers probably could use him this year. But in the Creighton game, he had a technical foul, 8 points and 11 rebounds. 

The Big East has a lot of pretty good basketball teams and Creighton will have to play well to finish up in the upper part of the conference. It is possible.

I would like to correct part of my column from last week.  I am pretty sure that the three-point line was never 119’4” in college. 19’4”—yes.