What's interesting about playing Texas is that their coach is Steve Sarkisian who, from 2009 to 2013, was the coach at Washington. He left to coach USC and the Huskies brought in Chris Petersen to lead the team. Petersen took the Huskies to the CFP!
Due to being in Texas, the Alamo Bowl was like playing on Texas' home field. San Antonio is only 79 miles from Austin by car (I'm amazed anything in Texas is that close). Attendance at the game was 62,730 (which is pretty good for a bowl game), almost all of it Texas fans. Crowd noise was definitely a factor.
Quarterback Michael Penix had trouble connecting on long passes. He completed none. Either he overshot or the Texas secondary stopped the catches. But he did well on shorter passes and managed to eclipse Cody Pickett's record for passing yards in a single season.
The officials didn't call an obvious pass interference penalty and reduced a roughing-the-kicker to running-into-the-kicker.
But still, the Huskies were never behind and won the game 20-27, finishing their season 11-2.
The final AP and CFP rankings will probably come out after the National Championship game on January 9th. I suspect we'll go up in both.
This has been an amazing year, especially after last year when they were 4-12. Coach DeBoer turned the program around so fast. Maybe next year we'll be 11-1 in the regular season and go to the CFP like we did in 2016 under Coach Petersen. Who knows? I just know I'm looking forward to it.
The Pac-12 sent seven teams to bowl games this year. But they ended up 3-4 after losing both New Years Day games (which were actually played 1/2/23). Two of the losses were razor thin, one going into overtime. But Washington State and Utah both lost big. Utah was playing Penn State in the Rose Bowl.
I was hoping the Pac-12 would do better this year. Lately it seems the conference has trouble winning bowl games. Again, there's next year.
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