FanHouse Purdue

What happens when the Sweet 16 is comprised entirely of storied powers? You get 16 teams all feeling the pressure to succeed. Ray Holloman takes an in-depth look at the expectations being heaped upon every team left in the Big Dance.

There is no room here for the little guy.

Were the Sweet 16 a country club, Tiger Woods might have to pull some strings to get a tee-time. Meanwhile Goliath might find himself picking splinters out of his warm-up-clad rear on any one of these rosters.

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You can't blame Jim Calhoun if he's whistling "Route 66" over the next couple of days because he certainly loves to travel west. Both of Calhoun's national championship teams, in 1999 and 2004, came out of the West Region. So Calhoun's probably feeling like a million bucks right now -- or $1.6 million bucks, as we all now know he makes (But he's worth it, just ask him.) -- with Connecticut grabbing the top spot out west.

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Back in my day, Joe Tiller thinks, kids ate their oatmeal and watched Cocoon and didn't get drunk and stabbed unless someone was accused of being a glabdang Tory.

The back-to-back housings of Michigan and Ohio State seem to have thrown the entire Midwestern football-industrial complex into a frenetic mania. As Charles Rich detailed earlier, the conference is spitting out arrests at a rate so prodigious it would make Dennis Erickson blanch. The latest miscreant is Purdue linebacker Jeff Lindsay:

The 19-year-old freshman was arrested by campus police Saturday and charged with public intoxication, minor consumption and resisting law enforcement. Lindsay posted $250 bail and was released from Tippecanoe County Jail that afternoon.

(Strenuous efforts were made by Fanhouse staffers to construct a William Henry Harrison joke out of this information but to no avail.) This is bad timing for Lindsay in the immediate aftermath of wide receiver Selwyn Lymon's stabbing and the arrest hours later of teammate Torii Williams for DUI, but a MIP is probably no more than a stairs-running offense. Throw another one on the pile.

Bowl bids are announced and Maryland will be facing Purdue at the Champs Sports Bowl in Orlando on December 29th at 8PM. Although I'm glad that the Terps are going to a bowl, after the loss in the last two games, I started losing interest in what bowl we could go to. The prospect of a BCS bowl or the Gator bowl is exciting, but the Terps are now in a bowl that is muddled in with every other mediocre bowl, all sponsored by every company in existence.

This will be a nice encore after a pretty good season. Much like the Terps, the Boilermakers didn't lose many games that they shouldn't. All but one loss to Penn State were losses to ranked teams. It should make for a good game against two teams that were good, but not great.

I'll have to do a little research on Purdue since I don't know much about the Big 10 team. I'll do that and report back.

Terps fans were all hoping for a shot at the ACC title and a BCS Bowl bid, but those plans fell through. After that, a lesser bowl is not that exciting. However, Maryland hasn't been to a bowl game in a couple years so just getting to a bowl is a step up. It's not what we were hoping for in the height of the season, but it's an extra game in December. And that's something we haven't had in Maryland in awhile.