Pac-12 Goes 1-1 When Blowing 30-Point Bowl Leads

In a holiday season cluttered with bowl-game clunkers, two of them had the decency to unclunk.

Yogi Berra is validated yet again.

It didn't exactly make two sets of fan bases all warm and fuzzy, but these things must be done in the name of entertainment.

And for good measure, TCU coach Gary Patterson also struck a blow for superstition.

So much for black being trendy, if not slimming. The Horned Frogs trailed Oregon, 31-0, with Patterson in dark garb.

However, purple was another story. It's a school color for a reason, apparently.

Then again, Duck chucker Vernon Adams Jr getting dinged out of the game might've had something to do with the turnaround, too.

Just when fellow Pac-12 member Washington State, under Mike Leach, seems to have buried the perjorative term Coug it, has it been supplanted by Ducked it up?

This one could've been called the Backup Bowl. TCU was down a starting quarterback -- like rust, stupidity never sleeps -- and a top receiver with another one hurt mid-game, while Oregon not only lost Adams, but starting center Matt Hegarty, too.

Suffice it to say the Horned Frogs had a deeper roster.

It's not that Oregon was unaware of what would happen with Adams out, either. Their national title hopes went down when a former teammate at Eastern Washington broke the QB's finger on a tackle in the Ducks' season opener.

And yet, they never really had a viable Plan B. Incredible.

What followed were three losses in their next five games, including a 42-point drubbing at Autzen Stadium to Utah.

So the Utes weren't new to building up huge leads or, as it happens, to tweaking in-state enemy BYU. Here's their Aussie punter, Tom Hackett:

Nothing personal, of course. It's just what Men from Oz do.

Leave it to those sinners in Las Vegas to promote Mormon-on-Mormon violence. Seems like they just couldn't resist the irony.

At least the Utes backed up their words, but as it happened, just barely:

Fortunately, just barely works.

Except when it doesn't.

But like that lady, Oregon can at least learn from it in the seasons to come.

As in, with their offensive style constantly exposing the physical well-being of quarterbacks, they might want to have more than one ready to go next time.