UConn 38, Cincinnati 17: Huskies somehow one win away from BCS bowl

I love two football teams, my sister’s alma mater and representative of my birthland, UConn, and the Northwestern Wildcats I adopted after moving into their neighborhood years before UConn even considered joining the big time.

Northwestern, a small private school that only fills its 47,000 seat stadium when Ohio State or Iowa fans buy up the last 15 -20,000 seats, struggles to be taken seriously in a league of enormous state universities even when its performance exceeds many of them (think the last two years moreso than this one). Fortunately, it’s relatively-new athletic director takes this challenge with deadly seriousness and sense of purpose. His aggressive lobbying efforts last year got NU picked ahead of Wisconsin and Iowa for the Outback Bowl, despite the massive butts-in-seats advantage those huge schools could offer.

I bring this up because it’s time for Jeff Hathaway to get going on doing the same. The job of Randy Edsall and the team is to prepare for victory in South Florida and let nothing distract them. It’s Hathaway’s job to deal with the distractions. Specifically, what if they lose?

This link http://www.offtackleempire.com/2010/11/28/1838462/2010-bowl-projections-post-week-13 is to a well-thought-out bowl projection article that takes yesterday’s results into account. Like the one where Notre Dame beat USC and will pick off the Champs Sports Bowl bid. This guy thinks UConn will lose to USF and fall all the way to the St. Petersburg Bowl, a huge comedown from the heights at which we now stand. He has the Pinstripe Bowl taking Syracuse over us – the same Syracuse that lost its last three including one convincingly at home to us. That’s appalling. Just because you hang banners saying “New York’s College Team” doesn’t make it so and it’s up to Hathaway this week to prove that. Or prove to the Meineke Bowl we’ll travel better than USF.

Sure, just because some guy on the internet says its going to happen doesn’t mean it will. But the reason why it will or won’t is what Hathaway does in the next week. Edsall will prepare for victory. Hathaway has to cover the contingencies. It’s not defeatism, it’s his job. Some righteous indignation from the fanbase wouldn’t hurt, either.