Hawaii Wins!

Hawaii did what it's been doing all season... just enough to win. Final score: Hawaii 35, Washington 28. This means we'll almost certainly be a shoo-in for a record third bowl game in a row.

So, Ault's great, right? I mean, he's brought us to three bowl games in a row! Nobody's ever done that before.

This is all quite true, but let's take a look at the circumstances of our latest potential bowl bid - Hawaii has to get a BCS bid and the WAC has three bowl bids on top of that. So, to get to a bowl game, we just had to be one of the top four schools in the conference. That's not hard. If you take out Tulsa and Rice from the 2003 standings, we did it then, too, with an identical record.

Here's my point - we're going to a bowl game, and that's wonderful. We beat who we needed to beat (finally!) to get that bowl game, helped in part by Coach Winter going up against a team that is mortally afraid of sub-50 temperatures. We beat that team soundly (good!). However, getting into a bowl game this year is easy compared to other seasons. It's only because of a perfect storm of events that we're getting in, not because we have a great record or because Ault is a wonderful coach.

Even so, I wish the Wolf Pack the best, I hope we get a bid, and I hope we play well. Like my compatriot, I'm not anti-Ault per se... I'm just not sure Ault is the guy that will get us into consistent Boise State/Hawaii territory.