NCAA Football Boston College Football

Now with an even more outdated cultural reference in the title! Remember metrosexuals? Far out!

WHAT NFL SCOUTS ARE SAYING

NFL.com's Pat Kirwan:

Ryan is the premiere quarterback of the class of 2008. He is a first round prospect with all the intangibles and is described accurately as a "winner." When compared to other draft classes, Ryan doesn't have the status of a Peyton or Eli Manning, Philip Rivers or Ben Roethlisberger to some clubs, but he is a guy you can build a club around. It will be hard for Atlanta, Kansas City and Baltimore to all pass him in the top 10 spots.

PROBABLY GETTING DRAFTED...

At the top of the first round.

GUY WHO WATCHED HIM FOR FOUR YEARS IS SAYING

Ah, Matt Ryan. White. Pretty tall. Strapping, even. Possessor of the most annoying nickname ("Matty Ice") this side of Chris Berman. Potential top pick in the draft according to people who must have never watched college football ever.

There's an uncanny consensus amongst college football fans on Ryan: Jesus, that kid is overrated. Rarely does an entire nation of college football fans agree on anything other than "Paul Maguire must be fired immediately," but ask any non-BC fan from sea to shining sea and you will get one response: don't draft that guy. Why after the jump.

While this may sound like a Sports Guy gambit, I assure you ... this award does in fact exist. Matt Leinart won it in 2004 by winning the Heisman and leading USC to its second straight championship. Vince Young won it in 2005 on the strength of possibly the most dominating single performance in college football history (the award takes bowls into account). Last year, JaMarcus Russell won it after leading LSU to a Sugar Bowl decimation of Notre Dame and eventually becoming the #1 pick in the draft. Matt Ryan, well- he won the Champs Sports Bowl. Scintillating!

Then again, considering that the Manning Award is meant to honor the accomplishments of all the Mannings, including Eli, maybe it's appropriate that the guy who ended the year a winner with lesser stats finished just ahead of the guy with the mindblowing stats and the crushing postseason loss. Ryan edged out Heisman winner Tim Tebow for the 4th iteration of the award, perhaps setting up the Manning as the new hotness in collegiate awards that discriminate against underclassmen. Quoth the elder,

"In an exceptional season for quarterbacks, Matt Ryan's performance rose above our most talented class of finalists ever to win this year's award," Archie Manning said. "His record-breaking season led Boston College to new heights and we are proud to announce him as this year's winner and look forward to honoring him in New Orleans later this year."

That's right, BC fans- you can win eleven games in a BCS conference and yet, a year in which you edge out the 8th-best team in the Big Ten a half-week before New Year's is still technically "record breaking." Ryan was later erroneously quoted as saying that he hopes to use the awards ceremony as a means of acquiring some sort of Big Easy voodoo charm that will allow him to endure his inevitable time with the Atlanta Falcons in a blissful, psychotropic haze.

Happy To Be Here?

To make a long story short, Boston College spent a good portion of the season in the top ten (deservedly or not) and even made its way up to #2 before losing to Virginia Tech in the ACC Championship. The Champs Sports Bowl gets the fourth selection from the ACC. There you have it. It is worth mentioning that BC had the weakest OOC schedule in the ACC, but once again, they find themselves up against a supposedly lesser opponent, in this case the 7-5 Michigan State Spartans who managed a sparkling 3-5 in conference record. Then again, they lost those five games by a combined 28 points, never losing by more than 7, so you might want to check the spread here.

Come Here Often?

Kiiiiinda. Though this is their first time at the Champs Sports Bowl, BC will now ensure that they've made a lesser bowl game in Orlando the last three decades. In 1982, they lost to Auburn 33-26 in the Tangerine Bowl (but what we'll remember most is the laughter) and in 1993, Glenn Foley directed them to a 31-13 win over Virginia in the Carquest Bowl.

Really wish it didn't have to come down to this, but the fact is, Virginia Tech seems to have BC right where they want them at the end of the first half. Yes, the Eagles are on their way to about 500 total yards against one of the most daunting defenses in the country, but in spite of their ability to move the ball against the Hokies, their 16 points come off the strength of a strange turnover and a Matt Ryan scramble. Many red zone opportunities have been wasted. Many a Sully has been forced to drink and blame it on their genetics. Meanwhile, VT has yet to establish themselves on offense in a consistent way, but they've been able to keep pace with opportunistic special teams play and shifty QB play. Regardless of whether or not this game will lace the coffers of the Jacksonville bigwigs is pointless; at least up to this point, we've got ourselves a far more compelling and competitive game than the ACC title tilt has seen up to now.

You know what's pretty good? Victory Golden Monkey. I don't know about you, but the ability to get a six-pack of 9.5% beer that actually tastes good and costs $10.99 at an LA BevMo is a pretty good find. And yeah, I know it's 10 AM, but you're not my mom. And if you are, I totally want a new pair of Wallabees for Hannukah.

You know what's also pretty good? Atlas Sound (beat the bloggers at their own game...this is some 2008 ish!). Just be thankful Deerhunter's not available in Getty Images, because Bradford Cox looks about as good as Brandon Cox plays.

Anyways, these two will guide me on my first-half Live Blog of the ACC Championship game. Just my thoughts, people...

As Matt Ryan has gone, so has Boston College. Both started off the season as dark horse candidates to win the biggest prize of 'em all. As the season progressed, it looked like more of a reasonable possibility. Then a pretty bad bender took them off the national radar, and put them around where most reasonable predictions had them at before the year began. But after coming up big late in the season, there's a chance that they can wrap up some nice consolation prizes; for BC, their first ever BCS bid. For Ryan, a solidification of his status as the best QB prospect in the draft.

In the meantime, being named the ACC Player of the Year will have to do. This doesn't come as much of a surprise, seeing as how he began the season as the Preseason POY (sort of a dubiously named honor if you really think about it). The bigger surprise is the margin by which he won it- Virginia DE (and ACC DPOY) Chris Long finished with 18 of the 71 first-place votes, about a third of Ryan's tally (50). No one else received more than one, among them Tashard Choice and Clemson QB Cullen Harper, who, loss to BC aside, may have statistically outplayed Ryan, at least until the two clashed for the ACC Atlantic title. Ryan set the BC single-season record this year with 28 TD passes, and provided he gets drafted by the Ravens (a likely possibility if previews are to be believed), he can expect to tally that in about four years time, flat.

There's a lot of talk about how Missouri being the #1 team in the BCS is more a matter of inertia than a determination of merit; after all, how could the best squad in the US and A be an underdog in a neutral field game? Well, when their opponent already spanked them once this year, I guess that's acceptable, even if it is a one-loss team vs. a two-loss team...that lost two games to unranked teams.

I can only imagine how Boston College fans feel at this point, seeing as how you could search nearly every legit sports site on the internet and not come up with a bowl projection that has the Eagles BCS-bound. Not only is the ACC championship in a neutral, cavernous site, but BC beat Virginia Tech in their own house. VT certainly has certainly been impressive over the last couple of weeks (beating Miami and UVA at home > beating Miami and Clemson at home?), but can it really be that cut and dry?

Well, BC can deal with another blow, that being the suspension of backup running back AJ Brooks for this Saturday's game for the ever-popular "unspecified violation of team rules"...which later became specified. As in, "being charged for assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, i.e., his own shoe." He was released on bail, and certainly won't be making it to Jacksonville.

Cool out, oddsmakers! Brooks has ran for a total of 79 yards this year, about half of what he ran for in his first start as a freshman. Granted, it was against UMass, but everyone deserves their Polk High moments, I suppose.

The ACC plans for football dominance -- and dreams of more than one team in BCS bowls -- continues to be on hold. Boston College and Virginia Tech -- the two throw-ins the ACC had to take to get Miami to jump conferences will face each other for the ACC Championship and the BCS Orange bowl appearance.

Boston College put Miami out of its misery for the season the way it has done for most of the seaon. Not pretty, but enough to do the job. Lots of passing yardage, some missed opportunities and a defense that plays decently. A very anti-climatic game after last week's wild game at Clemson. It was the first win for BC, though, over Miami in 15 games. Not since 1984 and Doug Flutie threw a Hail Mary had that happened. So the Eagles do have that going for them.

Virginia Tech pulled away from Virginia in the second half as the defense clamped down on the Cavaliers. The fourth straight loss by Virginia to their instate rivals. The Hokies have managed to stay out of any real national attention by losing their two biggest games. The blowout early in the season to LSU and then snatching a loss from the jaws of victory at home on a Thursday night against BC. Outside of Blacksburg, no one has been able to put much faith in the Hokies.

When the ACC puffed out to 12 teams several years back, it was pretty much anathema to anyone who wasn't John Swofford or affiliated with Virginia Tech. Most of this had to do with how it directly affected the basketball schedule; see the argument about Virginia being an "unfit" regular season ACC champion because they didn't get to play Duke or UNC twice (as if UNC winning at John Paul Jones was a given). On a less concrete level, it bothered purists who saw the ACC as a "basketball conference." Which is true in two fundamental ways: many of the conference's schools have achieved far more success on the hardwood than the gridiron, and (here's the important part), they don't have the characteristics of many "football schools." Besides having a handful of universities with enrollments of less than 10,000 (Duke, Wake, GT and now, BC) and mid-sized state schools (Virginia, UNC), even the larger universities (NC State, Florida State) aren't coming close to the nationwide alumni prevalence of an Ohio State or Texas or USC.

Now that the conference finds itself trying to fill out big boy bowls, this has arguably resulted in a dichotomy where the smaller schools get screwed during bowl season year in, year out because of misconceptions about a school's ability to "travel" and whether they're a "football" school. Of course, this ends up in the Catch-22 of schools like Virginia, Boston College and Wake being unable to change these reputations because they're being sent out to places like Hawai'i, San Francisco and Boise instead of somewhere within reason. They even had to instate a rule that preventing bowl selection committees from cherrypicking teams who have reputations that precede the actual product they put on the field; to illustrate the rule, if Wake Forest has a 7-5 record with a 5-3 conference slate, they can't be passed over for, say, Maryland if they're 7-5 with a 3-5 conference record.

Austin Murphy calls him "indispensable." ESPN's Bruce Feldman says, "He takes the Heisman more seriously than probably 99% of the Heisman voters themselves." And Sports Illustrated's Stewart Mandel says he "knows what he's talking about ... which is more than I can say of some pundits."

We're talking, of course, about Heisman Pundit and his website dedicated to "breaking down the politics of the most prestigious award in sports." The zigs and zags of this year's Heisman Trophy race being almost impossible to keep up with, FanHouse turned to the Chris Huston, a former Sports Information Director at USC, for answers. Huston conceived and directed the Heisman campaigns of both Carson Palmer and Matt Leinart .

FH: Is this the strangest Heisman race you've ever seen?

HP: Without a doubt. I've never seen another race filled with so many twists and turns. I've never seen so many viable preseason candidates fall by the wayside.

Who do you see as the frontrunner for the Heisman at this point?

Tim Tebow is the front runner. I think he has an 85% chance of winning at this point.