Boise State shows it's a grown up team now

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09/07/2010 -

They didn't need to dust off the ol' Statue of Liberty play, never thought of pulling off a fake punt.

Save those for, say, Jan. 10 in Arizona. That may be the only time this season that Boise State has to dig into its bag of tricks.

OK, so the hugely entertaining win over Virginia Tech doesn't exactly guarantee the Broncos a spot in the BCS title game. There are still lots of games to play, even more polls to take, and a lot more debating to do.

But after yet another sterling performance on a national stage one thing is clear: Boise State is a grown up football team now, and maybe it's time to start treating them as such.

The voters in the Associated Press Top 25 poll already do, rewarding Boise with a No. 3 ranking. The teams they will face with a giant bulls eye on their backs the rest of the season certainly will.

And if the Broncos run the table in the regular season for a third straight year, the people running the BCS surely better.

This isn't the little team that could anymore. This is a big team that really can.

The Broncos had just 60 minutes Monday night to prove they weren't just pretenders. An hour of football to state their case or spend the rest of the season as an afterthought on gaudy blue turf.

They needed almost every second of it to win a thriller over Virginia Tech that was so big many Boise State players celebrated by taking a victory lap around FedEx Field.

``Certainly we're proving people right right now,'' quarterback Kellen Moore said.

Probably winning a lot of fans along the way, too. Say what you will about their weak schedule, but the Broncos always seem to find a way to step it up when it really matters and are certainly a lot more fun to watch than the two teams ahead of them in the national rankings.

The fun this time took place on the road before 86,587 mostly hostile fans. Up early, behind late, Boise State found a way to come back and win on a touchdown pass to Austin Pettis with 1:09 remaining.

A team that first gained national attention with trick plays that beat Oklahoma in the 2007 Fiesta Bowl also showed it can play football the old-fashioned way, too, more than holding its own in the trenches against a tough and physical opponent.

Indeed, the Broncos answered every question except the one about their schedule. They had to, because they will have no other chance.

Their coach tried to downplay it all along, insisting it was just one game in a long season. But the players, college students that they are, were too smart for that.

They certainly understood the difference between the BCS title game and the Sheraton Hawaii Bowl that one lucky Western Athletic Conference team will be in this year.

``We know how much was at stake for us, so it was kind of like a bowl game,'' Pettis said.

Whether the win over No. 10 Virginia Tech will be enough to keep the Broncos in the national title chase despite their weak schedule will be debated endlessly over the upcoming weeks by the talking heads on television. Oregon State is really the only team left on the schedule with an outside chance of an upset and the Beavers have to play in Boise, where the Broncos just don't lose.

So Boise State will run up the score on Wyoming, and try to win style points by blowing out New Mexico State. They'll need to win big against teams that have nothing to lose by trying to pull their own big upsets.

They'll have to satisfy both the voters and the computers, and they can't afford to let anyone even play them close.

``We're heading off to Wyoming, and it's going to be the biggest game at Wyoming ever,'' Moore said. ``That's the way it goes, and that's the way we like it. We like to be everyone's biggest game.''

In years past, beating up on bad teams would have gotten them a pat on the back and a conference title. The competition simply wasn't good enough for Boise to move all the way up in the polls.

That changed this year, though, which is what made the game against the Hokies so big. Boise came in as the No. 3 ranked team in the country, just behind Alabama and Ohio State, two teams with a lot more football pedigree.

The Broncos don't need to climb. All they need to do is tread water and hope that the two teams ahead of them can't make it through much tougher schedules undefeated.

Nothing terribly tricky about that.

----

Tim Dahlberg is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at tdahlberg(at)ap.orgCopyright © 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.

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MySportsbook.com: New College Football Clock Rules Examined

Coaches and bettors alike are desperate to make sense of the new time-keeping rules on the NCAA gridiron. One of the big stories to come out of the Ohio State-Texas clash last weekend was Texas coach Mack Brown's criticism of the NCAA's new clock rules that are intended to shorten the duration of college football games, therefore affecting college football betting.

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17-10 in 2007. Granted, a 24-17 game last year might end at 21-17 these days, but the former - a three- or seven-point advantage being preserved as opposed to created - is the most likely scenario.

*UPDATE* - Sept. 25, 2007

New Clock Rules Boon for online bookmakers

By adjusting the time-keeping rules to shorten the duration of college football games, the NCAA hoped to make its product more enjoyable for the fans. While the NCAA's success in this regard is still up for debate, bookmakers couldn't be happier with the results.

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It's less than a month until the NHL hockey betting season opens at MySportsbook.com and preparations are underway for another battle in the race to hoist Lord Stanley's mug in 2007.

As cup crazy fans prepare to place their bets, one online sportsbook ,MySportsbook.com, is offering hockey betting lines on the 2007/2007 Stanley Cup , who will bring it home this upcoming season.

Despite a poor showing in last season's playoffs and the loss of Steve Yzerman to retirement, the Detroit Red Wings are early favourites at this online sportsbook with wagering odds of 6-1. The Wings will look to offensive powerhouse Pavel Datsyuk and newly appointed captain Nicklas Lidstrom to lead one of the league's most prominent franchises.

Always a threat are the Ottawa Senators, with newly acquired goaltender Martin Gerber from the Stanley Cup champion ,Carolina Hurricanes. The Sens are second best in the rankings at a 7-1 bet, and odds makers at this sportsbook are optimistic that the Ottawa squad will fare better than last season's Eastern Conference semi-final upset to the Buffalo Sabres.

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