USC, Michigan Impress; Illini Depress

USC and Michigan looked awfully good in their bowl games.  The Michigan win was especially sweet for me personally since Lloyd Carr is a former coach and a friend.  He deserved to go out with a win and his guys played their hearts out against the Gators and Heisman winner Tim Tebow.  I thought that Michigan would come up with a big effort but wasn't sure it would be enough for the talented Gators.  Without Mike Hart's fumbles in the red zone it would have not even been close.  Another thing that my eyes witnessed was that Michigan had as much speed as Florida; the pundits seem to think that the thick ankled guys from the Big 10 can't run with teams from the SEC.  Myth debunked and hopefully that kind of talk is over for some time now.

USC was the beneficiary of a young Illinois team not playing very well.  The turnovers killed the young Illini as well as not showing USC anything new on either side of the ball.  But give USC credit, they took advantage of every turnover and scored TD's after each and every mistake.  Hats off to Pete Carroll and his staff for the game plan on defense and the few new wrinkles they came up with on the offensive side of the ball.  But, the Illini will be back next year and hopefully the maturing process will help.  Illinois started a bunch of kids (freshmen and sophomores) and the experience of the Rose Bowl should help next year on trips to Madison, Ann Arbor, etc.

Now we have the big one left, LSU versus Ohio State.  More on that one in the next post...