John Walters

If this game takes its name from the Spanish word for “celebration”, how come everyone at the Fiesta Bowl looks so glum? Why did Ohio State coach Jim Tressel, when requested to bring 30 players to media day on Friday, opt not to include his starting quarterback among the two-and-a-half dozen Buckeyes? And why do we get the feeling that if Texas players were to send “Wish U Were Here” postcards to their Oklahoma counterparts, the sentiment would not be congenial?

Welcome to the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl, where everyone has a tortilla chip on his shoulder. Where two programs who believed, at different points of the 2008 season, that they’d receive their just desserts find instead that they are … just in the desert. Where the disposition of the fans will make that election night gathering for John McCain here two months earlier seem, by comparison, ebullient.

Fiesta Bowl 2009, where the slogan is, “Your Appointment With Disappointment.”

Each season only 10 out of 119 FBS schools (or 8.4 percent) are invited to play in a BCS bowl game. And yet annually there’s always a team or three from that select group that comes out of the tunnel looking dejected, looking like the kid who wanted Guitar Hero III for Christmas but who only got … a guitar.

Bummer.

Ohio State has been in a foul mood since mid-September, since USC waxed them 38-3 in the Los Angeles Coliseum. The Buckeyes had a number of players who could conceivably have gone pro after last season. Players such as middle linebacker James Laurinaitis, cornerback Malcolm Jenkins and offensive tackle Alex Boone.

Instead, that trio returned, joining 15 other starters from a squad that had advanced to the BCS Championship Game last January … and the January before that. Anything less than a third consecutive appearance, and a different outcome, would mean that they’d fallen shy of their objective.

And so, when the Trojans did what the Trojans do to Midwestern teams who venture to southern California, the frustration was evident.

“(Ticked). Extremely (ticked) off,” the mammoth Boone, 6-8 and 320 pounds, said afterward. “I mean, I don’t know what else to say … Every big game, we end up blowing it for ourselves.

"When we walked in at halftime and nobody was saying anything,” Boone continued, “I mean, what the (heck), we're Ohio State! We should be screaming and swearing and saying anything we could think of, and guys are hanging their head and you don't know what to say to them.”

The Buckeyes blame themselves, and rightly so. Not so the Longhorns. Here in San Antonio, where I write this, a T-shirt boutique is selling a burnt orange item that reads simply, “BCS Robbery.”

There were other one-loss teams that failed to garner an invite to Miami for the BCS championship game (not to mention an undefeated team out of Salt Lake City), but no other school could point to one play, as can the Longhorns, and say, “There! That’s where we lost it.”

The play, of course, was Graham Harrell’s touchdown pass to Michael Crabtree with :01 remaining in Texas Tech’s victory over the Longhorns on Nov. 1 (true Longhorn masochists will also remind you of freshman safety Blake Gideon’s hiccup on a potential game-clinching interception on the preceding play). That one play, remarkable as it was, erased three straight weeks of incredible efforts by the Longhorns in which they took down a trio of Top 11 opponents: Oklahoma, Missouri and Oklahoma State.

Video   Texas, Ohio State ready for showdown Jan. 3: Texas' Mack Brown and Ohio State's Jim Tressel can't stop praising each other's team before the Fiesta Bowl.

And when the Big 12 season ended, three schools stood at 11-1. The Sooners, although they lost to Texas, earned the invite to the Big 12 championship game, which became their on-ramp to the BCS championship game. Robbery? Not quite … but you can understand why the Longhorns feel like the Wronged Horns.