Payback or Pushover?

I guess there are some staffers at ESPN trying to keep their jobs and so they have convinced some higher ups that college football fans will not watch the sport--despite record numbers in recent years--without a label for most every weekend (there is also this need to turn coverage of the sport into an extended music video but that will be attacked in another post). It began with "Rivalry Week," which was placed in mid-November despite the appearance of huge rivalry games (Florida-Georgia, Oklahoma-Texas, etc) throughout the calendar. Now we even have lame unofficial monikers like this week's "Redemption Week," even though very few games fall into that category. Take the games played Thursday and Friday of this week. Miami wanted payback for the 41-23 beating adminstered on them by Georgia Tech last year and Fresno State, we were told, was angry that Boise State scored 51 unanswered points on them last year en route to a 61-10 final. Miami had three things in their favor going into Thursday night's game, great talent, confidence from their victory over Florida State in Week One and a home crowd. And so they got "payback" for Tech's "sin" of playing well last year. Fresno, on the other hand, had two major hurdles to overcome: tiredness from their trip to Madison (although that was overblown) and having less talent from the other guy. With Boise now winning eight of nine in this series, there should be no talk of Fresno getting payback when the reality is that they are just not as good as their rivals. They played well and enjoyed the home crowd, but they need to recruit better to beat the dominant force in the WAC conference.

Do you want a true payback game? Three years after Houston ran up the score (95-21) against an SMU program returning from the dead, the Mustangs whipped the Cougars 41-16 in 1992. That's payback.