Believe It or Not: Arizona Is Ranked

On Sunday morning, after waking up and throwing back a glass of H2O, I did what I always do ... opened the laptop and checked the college football rankings. It's a habit of mine, for no particular reason at all. I'm not a huge fan of a big powerhouse, sans my affiliation to my home state Texas teams.

This Sunday was different. I was pulling the rankings up with a purpose. I was going to see something I'd never seen in all my years as a football fan. My school would be ranked. My college was going to matter.

The University of Arizona is ranked in all the major college football polls for the first time since I set foot in Tucson, as a clueless 18-year-old hoping that I made the right choice with my selection. (Turns out, beautiful weather, all the golf I could ask for and a female student body that rivaled John Mayer's groupies is the recipe you want in a four year school.)

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I went to Arizona for a reason only sports fans could understand ... I wanted to be a part of a powerhouse. Of course, the Wildcats were that in basketball. I went when the team was preseason number one, outfitted with a sneaky quick point guard (Jason Gardner), a lock-loaded forward (Luke Walton) and a freshman class that was as talented as anything you could find in the country (Hassan Adams and Andre Iguodala). Of course, Gardner forgot how to shoot, the Wildcats couldn't get passed an equally stacked Kansas team in the Elite Eight and the curse of Wildcat athletics began. True story -- my junior year was the first time a senior class didn't make it to a Final Four under Lute Olson.

So, did we turn to football? Yeah, not so much. The pigskin team I was given as a undergrad was as pitiful as late night Los Betos. How bad was the squad?

In 2003, when the eventual national champion LSU Tigers came to town, I was the beat reporter for the school newspaper, set to cover the football team, and we played so poorly I gave the "Player of the Game" award to a cop that laid a perfect form tackle on a drunk student that ran out on the field in the second quarter. (And, honestly, if that police officer hadn't been in his 40s, the Wildcats may have thought about adding him to a defense that was kilometers away from the once herald "Desert Swarm".)

As you probably expect, Arizona playing this well is a treat. We have a coach that is as passionate as anyone in the country on the sidelines, basically bringing Olson's intensity to the gridiron. We have an offense that can move the ball. Our defense is top rate. I actually uttered the words, "You know, if we take down USC ..." before being slapped in the face by a friend.

The defeat of UCLA was something Wildcat fans haven't come to expect. The team played poorly, made a bunch of mistakes, didn't have their best stuff, and still won. Two years ago, with that effort, Arizona would have been stomping back to the lockers, heads hanging, with the fans grumbling yet again about how this team just doesn't have it.

Coaches have come to the Old Pueblo in unison, proclaiming how they'd be the guy to take the Wildcats to their first ever Rose Bowl. It's a joke ASU fans constantly hide behind, because it scares them to think that U of A is actually better than them at their own game. (Sadly, it's true ... the Wildcats are a better football team than the Sun Devils, tenfold. It isn't even close at this point.) Now, for the first time in years, a Rose Bowl visit isn't out of the question, albeit damn difficult. The last three games will be against Oregon, ASU and USC. Those are three games the Wildcats usually drop. It's in our nature to fail at the end of the season. That's what Arizona does.

But maybe it's different. Maybe, just maybe, this is a real football team. Maybe the win last year in the Las Vegas Bowl wasn't a mirage, but some sort of foreshadowing to what is to come. Maybe Arizona will stop sucking, finally, and people will begin buying football tickets for more reasons than just to get themselves in the basketball ticket lottery.

It still wouldn't be Arizona fans without this comment I heard Saturday night while basking in the glory of our 5-2 record. A friend, commenting on the upcoming schedule, started to complain about the Wildcats. It seems we've become too good, and if we continue down this path, we won't get another invite to the Las Vegas Bowl.

Welcome to the University of Arizona ... where the tailgate will always be more important than the score.