pr0ner wrote: ↑Mon Dec 21, 2020 9:09 pm
Apollo wrote: ↑Mon Dec 21, 2020 2:03 pm
OK, I was just wondering why the twitterhead you posted said "The SEC is without shame"?
Just another gratuitous shot at everybody's favorite conference, I guess.
Why did any of those teams get a bowl game before 9-2 Army? There really is no shame in the SEC.
Actually, if you look into the
facts of the issue, the SEC did nothing to hurt Army. In fact, Army's head coach praised the SEC and sorta blamed...The Pac 12.
From ESPN:
"Monken said he was concerned when Pac-12 teams began opting out of bowl season late last week. But he still thought Army would find an opponent for the Independence Bowl, which has been played in 44 consecutive years.
"The bottom line is there were enough people who kept saying, 'No, we don't want to play Army, we don't want to play Army,'" Monken said. "And I'm sure they don't want to have one week to get ready for the option [offense] or whatever, but our players, we've got guys on our team that wouldn't be invited as walk-ons to the teams we're getting ready to play. We've got guys from California, they didn't have a Pac-12 walk-on offer, and they are starting for us."
Monken praised SEC commissioner Greg Sankey for the league having 12 of 14 teams participating in bowls, even several, such as South Carolina and Mississippi State, with losing records. He noted that several teams seemed intent on participating in the postseason until losing games this past weekend.
"USC, a week ago, was saying, 'We deserve to be in the College Football Playoff if we go undefeated and win the Pac-12 championship,'" Monken said. "And the Pac-12 was saying, 'An undefeated Pac-12 team deserves to be considered.' So they go to the Pac-12 championship against Oregon and lose and they go from wanting to go to the College Football Playoff to not wanting to play at all? I don't get it. Boise State opted out today. They lost their championship game yesterday. So they went from being their conference champion and representing their conference in a bowl game to opting out? You couldn't go one more week and play us?
"It just doesn't make any sense to me that you can go from wanting to play to not wanting to play in a matter of 12 hours."
USC cited a recommendation from its medical team for why it opted out. And if USC hadn't opted out, it would have been almost guaranteed to play in the Alamo Bowl, which would have bumped Colorado to the Independence Bowl as Army's opponent.
Monken added that the situation is particularly unfortunate because neither Navy nor Air Force will appear in a bowl game this season.
"I'm not pointing the finger at any one person," he said. "It's just collectively, as a bowl season, whatever the system is, a 9-2 team should not be left out and a 9-2 Army team should not be left out. I don't know how we have an Armed Forces Bowl and a Military Bowl and a First Responders Bowl and at all of these bowl games, we're going to have service members coming back and being reunited with their families, we're going to put it on TV and it's going to be a feel-good story, and you're going to leave the Army team at home.
"How much bull is that? Somebody's got to fix that.""
EDIT: Just saw that Tennessee had to drop it's Liberty Bowl bid due to the Head Coach and several players contracting Covid-19. Army will take their place and play against West Virginia on Dec 31st. Good to see that it all worked out for Army in the end.