Saturday’s group of bowls were about as entertaining as a college football fan could want. The first quarter of the UNC-West Virginia game made the Oklahoma offense look unproductive. The individual performances by Hakeem Nicks and Pat White might not be topped over the rest of the bowl season, but ultimately the game was about Nick’s disappearance down the stretch and White’s precision passing on the winning score.

The nightcap was another game with solid individual performances and a close finish. Jacory Harris played well – if you could get past the broadcast crew’s gushing – but his spectacular blunder at the end made the difference. You also saw why Jahvid Best will get Heisman talk out of the gate next season. Did both the Cal and Miami coaches mismanage the quarterback position? Even if Harris wasn’t ready at the beginning of the season, it’s hard to imagine Miami getting better quarterback play in the bowl if a suspension hadn’t forced Randy Shannon’s hand. Further down the sideline, Tedford’s decision to play Longshore nearly cost them the game. It would have been hard to imagine Cal’s quarterback play being worse.

Even the FSU – Wisconsin game was interesting for a while. It’s tragically sad to see Wisconsin get all worked up because of the "speed versus power" cliche that gets slapped on a game like this and then go out and look slow and one-dimensional. Look, we know how Wisconsin plays ball. It’s been pretty successful for them, relatively speaking.

But putting this loss on Wisconsin’s (or the Big 10’s) style of play is lazy thinking. They played the same brand of ball in 2005 and 2006 when beating Arkansas and Auburn in bowls and also in 2004 and 2007 when they came up just short against Georgia and Tennessee. This is just a poor Wisconsin team, and I credit the ESPN studio crew for saying so. They had to scrape by Minnesota and Cal Poly, giving up over 30 points to each, just to become bowl-eligible.

FSU is now in competition with Notre Dame to see who can beat their chests more over winning a bowl game played nowhere near New Year’s Day.