Louisiana College Football Roundup

Only one Louisiana team will be bowling this holiday season.

Whether members of the Tulane, UL Lafayette, UL Monroe or Louisiana Tech college football teams will take to their local bowling lanes for a little kegling during December and early January is up to them. But that’s as close as they’re getting to a bowl game after what has to go down as a disappointing season for the state’s “other” Football Bowl Subdivision teams.

While LSU almost certainly gets an invitation to visit the Disney folks and the Capital One Bowl – without question one of the best third-place prizes in sport – the rest of the state’s formerly-known-as-Division-I-A teams will watch the nation’s 34 bowl games unfold from their couches and recliners.

Not much was expected from Tulane entering the season, and the Green Wave didn’t disappoint in being outscored 440-193 on its way to a 3-9 season, its seventh straight losing campaign.

Tech (3-8) still has a Saturday home game against 2-9 San Jose State (good luck on pulling people away from Christmas shopping for that one), but at least the Bulldogs had a chance at success. Take away three WAC road losses by a combined five points and Tech would be playing for a second straight bowl appearance on Saturday … maybe not the nearby Independence Bowl like last year, but a bowl nevertheless.

Both the Ragin’ Cajuns and the Warhawks were in the bowl mix entering the season’s final weekends, but both managed to wind up 6-6 after final chances at a needed seventh win went awry on Saturday. UL Lafayette fell to unbeaten Sun Belt Conference champ Troy 48-31 and ULM lost to league runner-up Middle Tennessee  38-19, both teams losing four of their last six after promising 4-2 starts.

The Cajuns’ back-to-back losses to Florida Atlantic and Florida International will stick in their craws for a while, considering a win in either game would have them packing for a bowl trip right now. Five of the Warhawks’ six losses came by 20 or more points, so ULM’s only regret and the only thing keeping the ‘Hawks from the bowl picture is the 21-17 loss to the Cajuns in Lafayette two weeks ago.

Maybe we shouldn’t expect much more. Among the 120 members of the FBS, the athletic budgets at Tech, UL and ULM are all among the bottom 20 of those that are made public. Tulane, as a private school, doesn’t have to make its budgeting process public, but it’s likely the Wave’s not among Conference USA’s big spenders.

But fans don’t want to see results based on dollars and cents. It’s all about wins and losses, and those schools had way too many of the latter this season.



NUMBERS GAME: UL Lafayette and UL Monroe both wound up bowl-eligible with their 6-6 marks, the fourth time in five years the Cajuns had reached the required six wins and the second time in three years for the Warhawks. Both, though, fell victim to the bowl numbers game.

The Sun Belt has only one automatic bowl tie, that with the Dec. 20 New Orleans Bowl in the Superdome, and Troy locked up that berth with its finale win over the Cajuns. Both the Trojans and Middle Tennessee finished with nine wins, and unless some back-room shifts take place Troy will be headed to New Orleans against likely opponent Southern Mississippi and Middle is on its way to the Little Caesar’s Bowl (formerly the Motor City Bowl) against MAC member Ohio.

UL and ULM could have each joined that group with a Saturday win, or by winning any other game somewhere along the line this year. With the way the numbers fell, every 7-5 team in the country is in a bowl game, and a couple more spots would have been open had either the Cajuns or Warhawks finished 7-5 instead of 6-6.

By bowl-game rules, teams with winning records have the upper hand on break-even teams in games that have open slots (where contracted conferences do not fill their quota). That means that bowl games would be required to take a 7-5 UL or ULM ahead of a 6-6 Notre Dame or UCLA this year.

Since that didn’t happen, all four fall into a four-team nether-world of at-large teams with break-even records, and are among 71 teams eligible for the 68 bowl slots. That number could increase by one or two should Hawaii upset Wisconsin Saturday and/or Army upset Navy on Dec. 12.

If those two games go true to form, then three bowl-eligible teams won’t be in the postseason field. Those will almost definitely be UCLA and the two Louisiana schools, unless the Fighting Irish – which fired coach Charlie Weis Monday -- elect to pass on a bowl invitation as some are speculating. In that case, UCLA’s in somewhere.

The only apparent hope for UL and ULM is for something drastic to happen, like some late academic scandal or a university suddenly deciding to pass on such an invitation. Marshall at 6-6 is in search of a coach, but turning down a bowl berth would be recruiting suicide for the Thundering Herd. In other words, it’s not happening.

And the Cajuns and Warhawks have only themselves to blame … unlike last year when the Sun Belt made bowl-game promises to its teams that its legal department couldn’t keep. Commissioner Wright Waters made it clear that league teams needed to get to seven wins if they wanted to go bowling, and the league’s two state entities didn’t do that. Instead, every bowl-eligible team in the MAC, the WAC and Conference USA – the other leagues that Sun Belt followers want to compare themselves to – is playing in a bowl game. But all of those, with the exception of Marshall, won seven games.



HEAD-SHAKING: It remains hard to envision that a team that has had so much regular-season success as McNeese State over the last half-decade remains winless in Football Championship Subdivision (I-AA) postseason play.

The Cowboys took another first-round pasting last Saturday, falling to New Hampshire 49-13 in front of an embarassed home crowd. McNeese, holder of 13 Southland Conference titles and sporting seven players on this year’s All-SLC first team after going 9-2, has now lost four straight NCAA first-round games by an average of over four touchdowns each – 30.5 points.

“Trust me, if I knew I’d have already fixed it,” Cowboy coach Matt Viator told the Lake Charles American Press after the lopsided loss. “This year we did things differently and I thought we had a good week. I really did. We just didn’t get it done. But I certainly don’t have the answer to that.”

Viator might have been shell-shocked enough to miss the opportunity to give credit to a New Hampshire team that’s better than most down-South fans know. The Wildcats boast wins over Army, Northwestern and Rutgers in the past few seasons, and are making a sixth straight playoff outing and have reached the quarterfinals five times in those six seasons. UNH is the only team to beat second-seeded Villanova all year –and those two Colonial Athletic Association rivals tie up in the quarters this week.

Regional fans may brag on the strength of the Southland, but there’s no question which is the nation’s best FCS (I-AA) conference in football right now. Four of the eight remaining playoff teams are from the Colonial – UNH, Villanova, Richmond and William & Mary.