Solid Bearcats just don't have that title-game look

CINCINNATI -- Looking for love, I came to Nippert Stadium on Friday night. It was my first visit to the 114-year-old home of the Cincinnati football team, and it was beautiful. Small but spectacular. Great view of the city behind the stadium. Great sightlines. Great atmosphere.

'I don't care how it looks,' Cincy coach Brian Kelly says about losing style points. (AP)

The game started, and I was feeling amorous. Let's go, Bearcats. Show me something. Something special, I mean. Show me something special.

Don't show me a three-point win.

Against unranked West Virginia.

With one touchdown that was a touchdown only in Braille.

Nope. Beating West Virginia 24-21 is good, but it's not good enough. Not for the stakes at hand, stakes that are much bigger than the Big East championship or even an undefeated season. No. 5 Cincinnati has had the misfortune of bearing down on a 12-0 season in a year in which there could be as many as five undefeated teams entering the bowl games, which means Cincinnati has to be better than perfect.

Cincinnati has to be perfect and sexy. And Cincinnati wasn't sexy Friday night. So since sexiness was my criteria, maybe I wasn't looking for love after all. Maybe I was looking for lust. Whatever it was, whatever I wanted to see from the Bearcats, it didn't materialize.

"I don't care how it looks," said Cincinnati coach Brian Kelly, who didn't exactly jump to his team's defense when I asked him how he thought the Bearcats did in their Friday night audition for voters.

"Winning a football game is hard," he said. "That's a top 25 team. We've played 10 in a row, we're nicked up, banged up, and we're just trying to fight through it. That other stuff, we can't control all that."

Said Cincinnati linebacker Andre Revels: "We don't put a lot of stock in statistics. All we need to know is that we came out with a win, and that's all that matters."

Well, sort of. Winning is all that matters if the Bearcats' biggest goal is to go undefeated this season, or to win the conference title. Beat Illinois on Nov. 27, and then beat Pittsburgh on Dec. 5, and those achievements are theirs.

But the Bearcats, and their fans, aren't going to be satisfied with those achievements. A season like this comes along once in a lifetime for a team like Cincinnati, especially if Kelly leaves for a bigger program after this season -- which I suspect he will -- and people around Cincinnati aren't talking about the Big East title. They're talking about the BCS title game, and wondering how the Bearcats can get into it.

Here's an answer: Beat unranked West Virginia by more than three points.

Especially when seven of Cincinnati's points were bogus.

You saw the play, right? West Virginia led 14-7 in the second quarter when Cincinnati tailback Isaiah Pead tried to stretch the ball across the goal line -- and had it knocked from his hands. Officials on the field called it a fumble, which West Virginia recovered.

In the replay booth, someone stared at replays for almost five minutes before deciding -- after five minutes -- that it was conclusive enough to overturn the call on the field. You ask me, a conclusive replay would be obvious in a few seconds, not after several minutes, but such is college football today. The Big East now has joined the SEC and Big Ten in having its officials make horrendous calls in favor of its undefeated national contender.

Cincinnati would need a lot more help to beat the biggest bullies in college football. That's what I saw Friday night. I saw a team that was physically manhandled up front by a previously unspectacular West Virginia offensive line, which blew open repeated holes for running backs Noel Devine and Ryan Clarke. I saw a Cincinnati defense that would be in all kinds of trouble against the power running game of Florida or Alabama.

But I saw a very good offense, and solid special teams. Most teams in football, when they say they have two quarterbacks, it means they have no quarterbacks. Not Cincinnati. The Bearcats really do have two quarterbacks. Tony Pike is the injured starter who returned after nearly a month off and threw two touchdown passes in his handful of snaps, all inside the red zone. Zach Collaros is the short, soft-tossing reserve who isn't a pro prospect like Pike but who might just be the better fit for Kelly's spread offense.

Pead is an all-league kind of running back. He has an outside shot at 1,000 yards on the season, and the 18 carries he got Friday night (for 175 yards) were a season high. Mardy Gilyard and Armon Binns are Sunday receivers. Kicker-punter Jacob Rogers is a bit erratic still, but he has NFL leg strength at both positions.

And Kelly is the next Urban Meyer, a coach who has won everywhere he's been and will continue to win everywhere he goes.

Cincinnati is worthy of respect, lots of it. But worthy of a bid to the BCS title game? In a season with several other viable contenders, most of whom are playing a much tougher schedule? Cincinnati isn't there. Not the Cincinnati I saw on Friday night.

And I wasn't the only one watching.