Tigers Win The Title

TigerBlog was a freshman at Penn when his friends Larry Harding and Stephen Ehrlich said that their friend from high school would be visiting on a Friday night.

The friend played football at Boston College, though as a freshman he wasn't on the travel squad. A week later, he would be traveling, when BC played at Penn State.

Down 31-0 in the fourth quarter, then-BC coach Jack Bicknell threw the kid into the game, and he played well enough against the Nittany Lions to earn the starting spot for the next three-plus years, not to mention the 1985 Heisman Trophy.

The friend was Doug Flutie, who along with Larry and Stephen went to Natick High outside of Boston.

TB was already a huge Flutie fan - how could you not be of a 5-9 quarterback who had one scholarship offer, who put up huge numbers every year and who was friends with friends from college? - when he watched the 1984 BC-Miami game (also at 336 Taylors Mills Road, where so many big games were watched) the day after Thanksgiving and saw what remains the single greatest play he's seen in a college football game that didn't involve Jeff Terrell and Rob Toresco.

Flutie remains a favorite of TB's, and anyone else in TB's age range.

Yesterday morning, TB heard Flutie on the radio talking about the coming BCS championship game between Oregon and Auburn and how it was going to be a shootout. When asked how many points would be scored in the game, Flutie replied: "north of 80."

He was wrong, of course - the final score was Auburn 22, Oregon 19, which made it barely north of 40. On the other hand, he would have been right had the game not been played 37 days after the two had last played.

When you have precision offenses like those two - who combined to average more than 90 points per game between them - you can't take that much time off and expect to pick up where you were. It doesn't work that way.

It was, for the most part, a perfectly dreadful game, with no rhythm or flow. The highlights were turned in by Oregon's kickers on a fake extra point and fake point, and the winning points came after a middle school-type situation, where Auburn running back Michael Dyer appeared to be down, got up, stopped along with everyone else, looked around and kept running.

Yes, it was a dramatic moment, but it was hardly a great play. It was more of a play that symbolized the night, when everything seemed to be off by a bit. Even the game-winning field goal had no drama, as it was essentially an extra point.

The game was a fitting end to a bowl season that was, like the BCS final, dreadful. Name one bowl game that captured the imagination? And could the bowl schedule have been set up any worse, as the two games that immediately proceeded the championship game were unranked Kentucky vs. unranked Pitt and No. 15 Nevada against unranked Boston College.

The Oregon-Auburn game would have been a much better game, probably "north of 80," had it not been for the excruciatingly long delay. And the way the bowls played out, it wasn't like they were building up to the final.

That's one of two major problems. The other is that there is no way anyone can convince TigerBlog that Auburn is a more deserving national champion that Texas Christian.

A playoff would solve both problems, but since that's not going to happen, TB can solve one of them:

Play the BCS championship game first, before any of the other bowl games. Play it Dec. 15 or so, giving the teams enough time to be fresh without losing their rhythm.

Looking for a precedent of playing the big event before the rest? How about America's best attended sport, NASCAR, which opens with its Super Bowl, the Daytona 500.

Anyway, the win by Auburn is at least somewhat a win for Princeton.

Several SEC teams adopted their nicknames from Ivy League schools, especially those that were the dominant football powers in the 1800s.

Georgia and Mississippi State, for instance, chose "Bulldogs" after Yale. Alabama is the "Crimson Tide," taking the "Crimson" part from Harvard.

Auburn chose to be the Tigers after Princeton. In fact, its colors of orange and dark blue were meant to mirror, but not completely copy, Princeton's orange and black.

Princeton's nickname evolved from the color black, to which orange was added in the form of a P on the chest of the football uniforms for the 1876 Yale game in Hoboken. The orange came Nassau Hall, named for William of Orange of the House of Nassau.

In 1880, Princeton added orange stripes to its sleeves, and the nickname "Tigers" grew from the look, coupled with a newspaper account that said the team "played like Tigers."

As for Auburn, it first started playing football in 1892. Princeton has won many more national football championships than Auburn, and the Tigers have an edge in all-time victories with 783, compared to 703 for Auburn.

Still, Auburn held up its end of the nickname nicely last night - even if the game itself wasn't good.

But no worries. When the powers that be in college football listen to TB and play the BCS final in mid-December, then it'll be much better.