oxsports has a collection of Vegas Bowl postmortems from various CFN intelligentia. You can read the whole thing, if you like, but here’s my synopsis:

1. BYU is not “44-20 good.”
He’s right: OSU scored 14 points in garbage time… BYU was “37-7 good.”

2. The real OSU didn’t show up.
Et alors??? I’ve said this before: So the real Mike Tyson didn’t show up against Buster Douglas. The real New England Patriots didn’t show up in Super Bowl XLII. This might be the ultimate sour grapes comment.

3. The Cougars were just happy to play in a meager, humble, pre-Christmas bowl.
Translation: Such a small-time event is beneath the mighty Pac-10 teams, so why bother preparing?

4. This OSU letdown was expected “after coming so close to a Rose Bowl berth…. Blame the wind… the Strip… the Civil War [letdown].”
Just don’t credit BYU? This jerk can’t even bring himself to use “BYU” as the subject of a sentence. And I’d call the disappointed-unmotivated argument weak (even when some Alabama and BYU fans used it last year), but it’s not even applicable here. To quote Corvallis’ local media:

The Beavers opened the game inspired, so there was no hangover from the Civil War loss that knocked them out of the Rose Bowl. They just couldn’t regain momentum once it was lost.

 

Or, better, let’s ask the players:

“It has nothing to do with the Oregon game,” linebacker Keith Pankey said. “For anyone to think it has anything to do with that, it’s foolhardy. We’ve always been able to look past what happened. We get better from it and move on. We moved on. We’ll do the same here.”

 

5. “This wasn’t a middle-of-the-road Pac-10 team that got spanked by BYU; this was Oregon State. This was the same team that was within 17 minutes of going to the Rose Bowl as conference champions and has nearly a quarter of the All-Pac-10 first team on the roster. The Beavers certainly didn’t look like it against BYU.”
Thank you!

But why didn’t the Beavers look like their usual selves? If anyone bothered to listen to post-game comments from BYU’s DE Jan Jorgensen, he said his coaches saw that les Frère Rogers accounted for two-thirds of OSU’s offense. Stop them, you stop the Beavers. He said something like, “We knew when they would run the fly-sweep before they did.” It was details like this that made OSU look so bad. They looked bad because BYU made them look bad.

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PS: Dennis Pitta

2009 Records
Most receptions by a tight end.
Most receiving yards by a tight end.
(Also third in TDs by a tight end.)

Career Records
Most receptions ever at any position at pass-happy BYU.
Most receiving yards by a tight end at BYU.
Most receiving yards by a tight end in the history of the NCAA.

2009 Awards
Consensus All-American
First team Walter Camp All-American
First team American Football Coaches Association All-American

Did not win the John Mackey Award as the nation’s top tight end?