Morning glory: Boise State, UGA hoops, and football recruits

I don’t know how many of you stayed up to watch it, but it’s official: Georgia will not open next season against the defending BCS champion.

Boise State lost at Nevada in overtime in a classic finish. The Broncos should have won in regulation after an improbable pass set up a chip-shot field goal. But the kicker then forgot how to kick.

So does that take a bit of luster off of next year’s Boise State-Georgia opener? Perhaps a little, since many assumed the Broncos would at least be coming off a year when a lot of people felt they should’ve been in the title game, or would be on a long winning streak.

All we do know is that Friday was a good day for the BCS cartel that controls college football and likes to avoid controversy: Auburn and Oregon stayed unbeaten, Boise State went down, and TCU is left as the only potential “people’s champion.”

Now let’s see how the SEC championship and the Cam Newton investigation go.

A couple other notes as we get ready for Georgia-Georgia Tech:

- The Georgia men’s basketball team is now 0-for-2 in Orlando after falling to No. 21 Temple. The Bulldogs’ last chance to salvage something out of the Old Spice Classic is Sunday against Manhattan.

Still, it hasn’t been a bad trip for Georgia. It lost to two teams, Notre Dame and Temple, that will be in the mix for the NCAA tournament, so that should help the Bulldogs' RPI. And they were in both games, with Trey Thompkins certainly not back to full strength yet.

But it does mean that next week’s two games against UAB and Georgia Tech are now pretty important. It would behoove the Bulldogs to enter SEC play with a couple good nonconference wins on their resume’. At this point, Colorado and Saint Louis aren’t in that category.

By the way, for those anti-playoff people in football who say the basketball regular season doesn’t matter, here we are in late November talking about the importance of nonconference games. Trust me, as someone who’s done this for years, and spoken to selection committee members about this, it matters.

- I had a chance to watch a couple Georgia recruits on Friday night: Nick Marshall’s Wilcox County High School team lost in the state quarterfinals to David Andrews and Wesleyan.

Marshall is a pretty intriguing athlete prospect: At cornerback he had two interceptions on Friday night, and as a quarterback he rushed for more than 100 yards and passed for 206. He’s a legit 6-foot-2, so the defensive coaches can use him at cornerback or safety.

But he also has the offensive skills to be used on that side of the ball. He can run, and while I know it was just Class A competition, Marshall made more than a few accurate downfield passes from the pocket. He also made a few questionable decisions, but his arm is legit.

Andrews, a three-star recruit according to Rivals.com, was on an offensive line that paved the way for teammate Kyle Karempelis to rush for 300 yards.

- As for the present-day Bulldogs, here’s the breakdown on Saturday’s game from myself and colleague Coley Harvey. We didn’t offer up a prediction, but this is how I would sum it up: Georgia should win convincingly, perhaps handily, as long as it doesn’t make too many mistakes.