Cam Ward lets Miami down by sitting out the second half of the Pop-Tarts Bowl

We all understand what college football era we are in.

Get what you can while you can. The players have the power. Loyalty? Pfft.

Most of it is fine. A decade ago, some people wanted to pretend that sports would collapse if NFL-bound players forfeited meaningless bowl games. Now you will be pleasantly surprised if you choose to do so. We adapt and the world keeps turning.

Still, what happened to Miami quarterback Cam Ward in the Pop-Tarts Bowl on Saturday doesn’t quite fit.

Leading up to the game, Ward — a Heisman Trophy finalist — said he was playing. And he kept his word. What he didn’t say, however, is that he only played in the first half.

Just long enough to throw three touchdown passes, giving him 158 for his career and one NCAA Div. 1 record held by Case Keenum since 2011.

And then Ward called it a day while his Miami teammates battled on, losing 42-41 to Iowa State.

Is it the worst sin in the world? No, of course not.

Ward has the right to play or not to play. He was the main reason Miami won ten games and almost made it to the College Football Playoff. And as we all know, these bowl games are little more than exhibitions right now. For heaven’s sake, they painted the sidelines with sprinkles and gave the winning team a giant Pop-Tart to eat. It’s not that big of a deal.

Despite it.

The way Ward handled it makes it seem like he only cared about breaking the record and then removed himself once he achieved it.

This doesn’t look good for Ward, for Miami, or for the sport. And Mario Cristobal, the head coach, shouldn’t have allowed it.

Either play the game and try to help your team win or stay at home. If you’re so worried about injuries that you can’t play the second half, why play at all? It doesn’t make any sense. And neither Ward nor Cristobal offered any real clarity, as the coach told members of the media that his conversations with the quarterback were private.

I don’t want to be too hard on Ward. A year ago, after the Pac-12 fell apart, he was 50-50 between the NFL draft or transferring from Washington State and a final college season elsewhere. The season he put together at Miami was arguably the best in the history of a program that had a lot of really good quarterbacks.

Ward was given the right to leave on his terms. And if he had simply been eliminated from the bowl game, no one would have complained.

Chasing records is part of sport, but it is unseemly for an athlete to sacrifice team success in the process.

And when Miami got the ball back with 56 seconds left and needed a field goal to win the game, it certainly would have been nice if Ward had made himself available to lead his team down the field.

Instead, sophomore backup Emory Williams got choked up and couldn’t get the ball past the 50-yard line.

Ward had no way of knowing the game would come down to this, but it’s clear he never intended to treat this final opportunity to play college football with the respect it deserved. Instead, he used it as a vehicle to write his name into the record books.

Congratulations to Ward on this Pyrrhic victory, while he will forever have to accept this defeat for his team.

ACC’s disastrous postseason

It’s important to be cautious and even measured when evaluating conferences based on bowl performance.

But the ACC will have a hard time winning the narrative battle after this year’s postseason flop.

At the time of Miami’s loss, the ACC was 1-8 in postseason play, including SMU and Clemson’s elimination from the playoffs last weekend. Later Saturday, NC State increased its record to 1-9 after giving up an 86-yard touchdown run against East Carolina with 93 seconds left in the Military Bowl. That leaves Syracuse as the only ACC winner to date, defeating Washington State in the Holiday Bowl.

The ACC will have three more opportunities to get some wins: Louisville plays Washington in the Sun Bowl, Duke plays Ole Miss in the Gator Bowl and Minnesota faces Virginia Tech in the Duke’s Mayo Bowl. So things could end up looking a little better – or even worse.

Regardless, the ACC still has a lot of work to do over the next eight months to improve its reputation as a power conference after a season in which it was abundantly clear that the league was a few notches below where it should be.

Obviously, Florida State’s implosion from 13-1 to 2-10 was a big part of that. The newcomers Cal and Stanford didn’t bring much with them. NC State had a bad year and North Carolina was so mediocre that Mack Brown was fired.

While SMU was an entertaining story, it doesn’t bode well that the Mustangs rose from the Americans and went 8-0 in league play before losing the conference championship game. And Clemson, meanwhile, was good enough to win the league with a team that doesn’t even come close to the talent level that Dabo Swinney had during his 2016 and 2018 national championship eras.

Although picking SMU for last place in the CFP was not particularly controversial given the uninspiring alternatives, the questions about their schedule were legitimate. The ACC is currently a 17-team league with nine programs either severely underperforming or just plain bad.

There are a lot of asterisks attached to bowl results with injuries, cancellations and coaching changes, but when the results are so dramatically poor and factor into your conference’s season-long narrative, that’s a problem. Every year is different, but the ACC needs to do something next season to get the benefit of the doubt back.

Georgia is the mystery team

For months, maybe even years, the entire premise that Georgia would win the first 12 12-team College Football Playoff revolved around Carson Beck being one of the best quarterbacks in the country.

That didn’t happen, but somehow Georgia won the SEC.

Now he’s out of it – not just out of the lineup after a season-ending elbow injury, but out of college football entirely after declaring for the NFL Draft. However, Georgia is still there.

But for how much longer?

The Bulldogs’ hopes of winning a third national title in the last four years rest on Gunner Stockton, a backup with 51 career pass attempts, almost all of them in low-stakes situations – until he was forced to pass to Beck during the season replacing second half of the SEC Championship Game.

Stockton was just effective enough that day for Georgia to escape with a 22-19 overtime win over Texas. But make no mistake: Georgia’s offense’s response in Wednesday’s quarterfinal against Notre Dame is the most interesting storyline of the playoffs.

What you’re hearing around the Georgia program is a lot of confidence that Stockton, a highly prized recruit a few years ago, is good enough to lead this team to a title.

But when it comes to college football as a whole, you hear a fair amount of skepticism that a quarterback who has barely played for three seasons can come out of nowhere and make the potential playoff battle against Notre Dame, Penn State and a national championship game against Oregon, Ohio State or Texas.

“The way he prepared for the game, day in and day out, like he was the starter, I think prepared him for this moment,” offensive coordinator Mike Bobo said Saturday during a Sugar Bowl news conference. “If you asked me last year, I don’t think he had the same attitude.”

Maybe this is just happy talk to give the Georgian players hope and hunger as they find themselves in a situation that anyone would consider less than ideal.

Or perhaps there is confidence that Stockton, from a town of fewer than 1,000 residents in northeast Georgia, will rise to the challenge.

However, here’s what we know for sure: If there had been any program other than Georgia in this situation, they would have been written off as championship contenders.

But considering it’s Kirby Smart and a roster full of legit NFL prospects, you just can’t send Notre Dame to the semifinals.

In the SEC Championship Game, Stockton completed 12 of 16 passes for just 71 yards and threw one interception. He can also run around a bit, which is an element Georgia’s offense didn’t really have with Beck.

The reality check for Stockton, however, will be that he faces a good defense that has had time to watch film on him and prepare. Texas was on his heels when Stockton entered the game because the Longhorns simply weren’t ready for a different style of offense. Now that everyone knows what’s coming, it won’t fool Notre Dame — or anyone else, for that matter.

Stockton is no outsider. He is a real young talent with talent who has been in the system for a few years. But if Georgia is truly good enough to win it all with him, it will be one of the greatest coaching achievements of the decade.

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Cam Ward lets Miami down by sitting out the second half of the Pop-Tarts Bowl

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