I'm a fan of the Rice Owls. Before you start snickering, you should know that the Rice football team finished this season 8-4, their best record since 1953 when Tommy Lewis came off the bench in the Cotton Bowl to tackle Dicky Moegle on his way to the end zone. Anyway, we fans on the Rice fan forum speculated endlessly about bowl possibilities, since the Western Athletic Conference only had two guaranteed bowl slots this year. Since Rice didn't win the conference, it was gonna take a miracle for the pieces to fall into place. The bowl we focused on was the hometown Galleryfurniture.com bowl. Had a Big 12 or C-USA team failed to qualify, we figured we had a good shot at it.

It didn't happen, and so Texas A&M took on and defeated former SWC conference mate TCU. We've all moped and done the coulda-shoulda-woulda thing. Then today I came across Bill Simmons', aka The Sports Guy's report on the game. And y'know, all of a sudden it doesn't feel quite as bad.