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Best regular season -- the NFL makes a case
Published: 12/30/2012 10:43 PM
Last Modified: 12/30/2012 10:43 PM

I always chuckle when I hear BCS proponents refer to the college football regular season as the "best in sports."

For one thing, it's a poor defense of the terrible way the sport crowns its champion.

But more importantly, it's probably not true.

You think, after Sunday, NFL fans would concede that distinction to college football?

You had the top three seeds in the AFC determined. Former Sooner Adrian Peterson led Minnesota to the playoffs and nearly ran himself into NFL history. Chuck Pagano returned to the Indianapolis sideline from his battle with cancer. And Washington captured the league's final playoff spot in a prime-time showdown.

That's a pretty good final day of the regular season.

Here are a few observations from Sunday:

* For one of only a handful of times this season, I was able to sit down and watch a complete Houston Texans game. What happened to that team?

I remember the early days of the franchise, so they've definitely come a long way. But that doesn't diminish the disappointment of a team that looks like it peaked in November and fell from the No. 1 seed in the AFC to having to play a first-round game.

Who else is disappointed? Monster truck fans in Houston. A monster truck rally scheduled for Reliant Stadium next Saturday will have to be moved to accommodate the Texans home game against Cincinnati in the first round.

* Adrian Peterson is pretty good, huh? Sometimes guys are stud recruits in high school for a reason. Peterson is one of those guys.

Rushing for 2,000 yards is special. Doing it on a reconstructed knee is incredible. Finishing 9 yards short of the NFL single-season rushing record while leading your team to the playoffs is something they put in movie scripts.

As Guerin Emig blogged about last week and John Hoover has written about over the past couple, Oklahoma coaches always knew Peterson was something special. Now the world knows, too.

* Speaking of special, there's Robert Griffin III. For my money, he was the most exciting player in college football last season. A year later, he's the most popular person in the nation's Capitol.

As Barry Switzer joked about on Twitter on Sunday, Washington coach Mike Shanahan has done a nice job playing to Griffin's offensive style.

Hopefully Griffin can stay healthy and stay fun.

* If you're a Dallas fan, would you have expected anything different -- a game-sealing interception by Tony Romo.

If Romo was the quarterback of the Buffalo Bills, few around the country would even know who he was. He's extremely talented, wildly inconsistent and pretty clearly not a championship quarterback in the NFL.

Dallas, by the way, was largely a beneficiary of its schedule this season. The Cowboys have two victories against teams with winning records and only one of those teams is going to the playoffs.

Dallas needs a total rebuild, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

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dryoungster (last month)

The NFL playoffs are so much better and make the college bowl games seem like grade school football. A playoff is needed with all conference champs involved.

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Tulsa World Sports Editor Michael Peters has nearly 20 years of daily newspaper experience. A 1993 graduate of Texas A&M, he worked at papers in Bryan-College Station, Texas, Beaumont, Texas, and Galveston, Texas, before joining the Houston Chronicle as High School Sports Editor in 2008. While in Houston, he coordinated coverage of the 2008 Texas Class 5A state football championships and the 2011 NCAA Men's Final Four.

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