Colt McCoy: What Would've Happened If He Put a Little More Air on That Ball?

We were one second away from pure unadulterated BCS chaos.

One second!

Colt McCoy rolled right—six seconds, five seconds, tick, tick, tick. He fired a weak pass to the sidelines and the clock struck zero. Nebraska was victorious. Bo Pelini and the Cornhuskers raised their hands in celebration and disbelief as the victors of the Big 12 Championship.

Ah, but alas, it’s Texas, and we all know the clock winds longer for the Longhorns. They would be given that mythical second and Garrett Hartley saved us all from the “chaos.”

So what would have happened if maybe Hartley had missed the 46-yarder, or maybe if McCoy had floated the ball just a second longer? What would the chaos have looked like?

How would it have affected the bowls?

The National Championship

Alabama would have played Cincinnati, who was ranked No. 3 in the BCS standings after their earlier win over Pittsburgh to finish the season 12-0. The bowl game would have been marketed as the big, bad No. 1 team in America versus the feisty, abandoned underdog playing for ultimate pride.

Judging from Cincinnati’s performance in the Sugar Bowl—the game would have been a one-sided affair.

As for the other bowls? Well, now you have to realize that Nebraska is in play for a BCS spot, so that means one of the teams would have been bumped out.

Fiesta Bowl

The team pushed out would have been Boise State. The BCS only has to guarantee one non-automatic qualifying team a bid if they are high enough in the rankings. Boise State would have been the scapegoat even though they were ranked No. 6 in the BCS standings.

All the other bowls would have stayed relatively the same (Texas would have probably gone to the Sugar Bowl), but this would have raised a lot of hell from a Boise State point of view. This would have been a team that went 13-0 and would have still been denied not just a shot at a National Championship but a shot at any BCS bowl.

It would have been two years in a row that Boise was screwed by the BCS gods. The controversy would have been fun.