I saw this coming, and it kind of pisses me off. The part that pisses me off is not the result, but the headline and its ilk. Cal got screwed out of a Rose Bowl bid, and then they did not show up for the Holiday Bowl. That's kind of a shame, and they should be a little bit embarrassed. However, in no way, shape or form does it lessen the fact that they should have been in the Rose Bowl. Football is a game where emotion matters. Playing a lousy game when you don't really want to be there isn't much of an indicator of where you actually deserved to be.

Of course, I shouldn't have been surprised when Cal got leapfrogged, because it means three of the last four years a Pac 10 team has been squeezed in the BCS. Three years ago Oregon was denied a shot at Miami in favor of a joke of a Nebraska team, and last year the consensus #1 Trojans were denied a shot at the Orange Bowl.

When the Rose Bowl joined the BCS, it was to protect its member conferences from being unjustly shut out of the national title picture. Hopefully, the Rose Bowl committee has learned from this cycle and pulls out of the BCS when the contract comes up for renewal, because the Pac 10's interests are not being protected by the system as it stands.

Of course, there's a really super-ultra-easy solution to this that has occurred to everyone else who runs a sports league, including every other NCAA sport and Division 1AA, 2 and 3 football, but that would apparently be too radical, and that's a rant for another day.

Happy New Year's everybody! (Texas and Utah football fans excepted)