It was what I was afraid of with this game. Three games back they were one of the leading candidates to make the Final Four. Now they are playing in the Sun Bowl on a rainy day. They have much more talent than Duke and could still pull away in the second half. But right now they look like they could care less. And Duke wants badly to get the bowl loss monkey off their backs.
I usually don't put a lot of emphasis into who is happy to be in the bowls and who isn't. But just like last year when Arizona State lost the Pac-12 title game and was relegated to the Holiday Bowl, they probably qualified as potentially the most disappointed team coming into these bowls. And Duke isn't the kind of team you can just blow off or they'll kick your ass.
No, for years I have gone back and looked at the stats on these games, and the great majority of them play out pretty much like the numbers. But the problem is a good portion of the public gets caught up in what the ESPN talking heads are saying about these teams, and they end up like sheep following the the sheep header to the slaughter. But each year you have about 4 or 5 games of of the 38 or so bowls that don't play out like they should, or are way off from the numbers. Then the public starts getting caught up in this aspect of it, which is a mistake.
