We all understand what college football era we’re in.
Get what you can while you can. The players have the power. Loyalty? Pfft.
Most of this stuff is fine. A decade ago, some people wanted to act like the sport would collapse if NFL-bound players opted out of meaningless bowl games. Now, you’re pleasantly surprised when they opt in. We adjust and the world keeps spinning.
Still, what happened Saturday with Miami quarterback Cam Ward in the Pop-Tarts Bowl doesn’t sit right.
Leading up to the game, Ward — a Heisman Trophy finalist — said he was playing. And he kept his word. But what he didn’t say is that he was only playing for the first half.
Just long enough to throw three touchdown passes, giving him 158 for his career and an NCAA Div. 1 record that Case Keenum held since 2011.
And then Ward shut it down while his Miami teammates battled on, losing 42-41 to Iowa State.
Is it the world’s worst sin? No, of course not.
Ward has a right to play or not play. He was the main reason Miami won 10 games and came very close to making the College Football Playoff. And as we all know, these bowl games are little more than exhibitions at this point. For goodness sakes they painted the perimeter of the field with sprinkles and give the winning team a giant Pop-Tart to eat. It’s not that big of a deal.
Still.
The way Ward handled this makes it seem like he only cared about breaking the record, then removed himself once he got it.
That’s not a good look for Ward, for Miami or for the sport. And Mario Cristobal, the head coach, should not have allowed it.
Either play the game and try to help your team win or stay home. If you’re so worried about injury that you can’t play the second half, why play at all? It doesn’t make any sense. And neither Ward nor Cristobal offered any real clarity, as the coach told media members that his conversations with the quarterback were private.
I don’t want to be too harsh on Ward. A year ago, after the Pac-12 fell apart, he was 50-50 between the NFL Draft or transferring out of Washington State and playing one final college season elsewhere. The season he put together at Miami was arguably the best in the history of a program that has had a lot of really good quarterbacks.
Ward earned the right to exit on his terms. And if he had simply opted out of the bowl game, nobody would have complained.
Record chasing is part of sports, but it’s unseemly when an athlete sacrifices team success in the process.
And when Miami got the ball back with 56 seconds left needing a field goal to win the game, it sure would have been nice for Ward to make himself available to lead his team down the field.
Instead, sophomore backup Emory Williams got swallowed up and couldn’t advance the ball past the 50-yard line.
Ward couldn’t have known the game would come down to that, but it’s clear he never intended to treat this last opportunity to play college football with the respect it deserved. Instead, he used it as a vehicle to put his name in the record books.
Congratulations to Ward on that Pyrrhic victory while he forever owns this loss for his team.
ACC’s disastrous postseason
It’s important to be careful, even measured, about judging conferences based on bowl performance.
But the ACC will have a difficult time winning the narrative battle after this year’s postseason flop.
At the moment of Miami’s loss, the ACC was 1-8 in postseason games including SMU and Clemson being eliminated from the Playoff last weekend. A little later on Saturday, NC State brought the record to 1-9 after giving up an 86-yard touchdown run to East Carolina with 93 seconds left in the Military Bowl. That leaves Syracuse as the only ACC winner so far, beating Washington State in the Holiday Bowl.
The ACC will have three more opportunities to put some wins on the board with Louisville playing Washington in the Sun Bowl, Duke playing Ole Miss in the Gator Bowl and Minnesota facing Virginia Tech in the Duke’s Mayo Bowl. So things could look a little better by the end — or they could look even worse.
Regardless, the ACC has a lot of work to do over the next eight months to patch up its reputation as a power conference after a season where it was just very clear that the league was a couple rungs below where it should be.
Obviously Florida State’s implosion from 13-1 to 2-10 was a big part of it. New additions Cal and Stanford didn’t bring much to the table. NC State had an off year, and North Carolina was so mediocre that Mack Brown got fired.
Even though SMU was a fun story, it’s not a great sign that the Mustangs moved up from the American and went 8-0 in league play before losing the conference championship game. And Clemson, meanwhile, was good enough to win the league with a team that isn’t even close to the talent level Dabo Swinney had during its national championship era in 2016 and 2018.
Though it wasn’t super controversial to pick SMU for the last at-large spot in the CFP given the uninspiring alternatives, the questions about its schedule were legitimate. The ACC, at the moment, is a 17-team league where nine programs are either severely underachieving or just flat-out bad.
Bowl results have a lot of asterisks attached with injuries, opt-outs and coaching changes, but when the results are this dramatically bad and play into the season-long narrative about your conference, it’s a problem. Every year is different, but the ACC needs to do something next season to earn back the benefit of the doubt.
Georgia is the mystery team
For months, maybe even years, the entire premise of Georgia winning the first 12-team College Football Playoff revolved around Carson Beck being one of the best quarterbacks in the country.
That didn’t happen, but somehow Georgia won the SEC.
Now he’s gone — not just from the lineup after a season-ending elbow injury but from college football entirely after declaring for the NFL Draft. Georgia, though, is still here.
But for how much longer?
The Bulldogs’ hopes of winning a third national title in the last four years rest on Gunner Stockton, a backup with 51 career passing attempts, nearly all of them in low stakes situations — until, that is, he was forced to replace Beck in the second half of the SEC championship game.
Stockton was just effective enough that day for Georgia to escape with a 22-19 overtime win over Texas. But make no mistake: How Georgia’s offense responds in Wednesday’s quarterfinal against Notre Dame is the most interesting storyline of the Playoff.
Around the Georgia program, what you hear is supreme confidence that Stockton, a highly-rated recruit a few years back, is good enough to carry this team to a title.
But around college football at large, what you hear is a huge dose of skepticism that a quarterback who barely played for three seasons will be able to come out of nowhere and run the potential Playoff gauntlet of Notre Dame, Penn State and a national championship game against Oregon, Ohio State or Texas.
“His day in and day out, how he approached getting ready for the game as if he was the starter, I think has prepared him for this moment,” offensive coordinator Mike Bobo said Saturday during a Sugar Bowl press conference. “If you asked me that last year, I don’t think he had that same mindset.”
Maybe that’s just happy talk to keep Georgia’s players feeling hopeful and hungry as they head into a situation that anyone would consider far from ideal.
Or maybe the confidence is real that Stockton, from a town of fewer than 1,000 people in northeast Georgia, can rise to the occasion.
Here’s what we know for sure, though: If it were any program other than Georgia in this situation, they’d have been written off as a championship contender.
But given that it’s Kirby Smart and a roster loaded with legitimate NFL prospects, you just can’t pencil Notre Dame into the semifinals.
In the SEC championship game, Stockton completed 12-of-16 passes but for only 71 yards and threw an interception. He also can run around a bit, which is an element Georgia’s offense didn’t really have with Beck.
The reality check for Stockton, though, will be facing a good defense that has had time to watch some film on him and prepare. Texas was on its heels when Stockton came in because the Longhorns simply weren’t ready for a different style of offense. Now that everyone knows what’s coming, it won’t fool Notre Dame — or anyone else.
Stockton isn’t some walk-on underdog. He’s a real prospect with talent who has been in the system now for a few years. But if Georgia is truly good enough to win it all with him, it’s one of the great coaching achievements of the decade.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Cam Ward lets down Miami by sitting out Pop-Tarts Bowl second half
