Well, Tyler Palko did not win the ABC Sports/Cingular/ESPN All-America Player of the Week. It went to Carnell Williams of Auburn. This was just part of the national attention given to Palko after this weekend’s performance. Still, it will be hard for Palko to even get named to the All-Big East Team this year:
Paul Peterson of Boston College has his team in the national rankings and led the Eagles to a crucial win over West Virginia on Saturday. Dan Orlovsky of Connecticut is the top passer in the league, Ryan Hart is rewriting the record books at Rutgers, Walter Washington of Temple is the best quarterback you’ve never heard of and Rasheed Marshall still has WVU in position for a possible Big East title and a BCS berth.
Palko is 4th in the Big East in Passing. In Passing Efficiency, he is 2nd to Rasheed Marshall; 2nd behind Walter Washington in Points Responsible For; and 4th in Total Offense.
Josh Cummings was still feeling good about kicking the game-winning field goal.
“I said before the kick, that it really couldn’t get much worse than what happened to me the last week, except for the fact that we hadn’t won (at Notre Dame) in 18 years and it was the final second of the game,” said Cummings, tongue in cheek. “It felt good to put those last points on the board.”
Now there is bowl speculation. Pitt could still, technically, make the BCS bowl if: Pitt beats WVU and USF, and Boston College loses to Syracuse and/or Temple. While the Gator Bowl might be Pitt’s best hope, they don’t want Pitt. Worse, they don’t have to take Pitt and neither do other bowl tie-ins if Pitt splits their last 2 games:
If Boston College wins out, however, Pitt could be looking at a case where it wins its final three games to finish 8-3 and ends up in the Insight Bowl — or worse if Notre Dame can somehow upset top-ranked Southern California. That’s because even though Pitt will have beaten West Virginia, the two teams would have the same record and that would mean it would be the Gator Bowl’s choice of who to invite.
The choice would seem fairly simple.
West Virginia has sold out its ticket allotment for bowls the past two years and was responsible for helping both of those bowl games be sellouts (including the Gator Bowl last year), while Pitt sold less than 2,000 tickets to the Continental Tire Bowl last year and has struggled to sell tickets to its bowl games the past four years.
That would mean Pitt, even at 8-3, would head to the Insight Bowl. Connecticut (5-4, 2-3) is reportedly the top choice of the Tire Bowl if it can win one of its final two games against Buffalo and Rutgers, because it is assumed the Huskies will travel well to their first bowl game.
If Pitt loses one, to finish at 7-4, and Connecticut wins its two, the Panthers could be squeezed out of the Big East’s bowls and have to hope that one of the other major conferences fails to fill all of its spots. That’s because Notre Dame (6-4) is the desired first choice of the Insight Bowl.
The Irish already are bowl eligible, but with a trip to USC Nov. 27, another loss would not be good enough to knock an 8-3 Big East team out of a bowl, but it would be good enough to knock a 7-4 team out, because the conference has a “one-win” rule in effect.
The only good news is that as much as people want to rip the Big East for not being good, this is a down year for a bunch of conferences, and there will likely be more bowl bids than bowl eligible teams. Hello, Motor City Bowl.
Again, this is kind of meaningless right now, and the problem can most easily be resolved by Pitt winning.
