As the temperature dips below freezing tonight in New Orleans, the Georgia Bulldogs are in the process of demonstrating why undefeated teams from lesser conferences should get zero sympathy for being left out of the national championship picture.

This is not just a massive Sugar Bowl defeat for Hawaii: This is one team playing football and the other prepared to play tag. And not the hard-hitting tag of my youth, but modern tag where no one is ever “it” and everyone wins in the end.

Hawaii belongs in the Sugar Bowl tonight like I should be contending for one of the nine heavyweight boxing belts…except in my case, I would at least have a shot.

Prior to tonight I honestly thought the Sugar Bowl would be the most interesting game of the godforsaken BCS college football championship fiasco. Everyone acknowledges the rash of losses at the end of the regular season resulted in a “championship” game between LSU and Ohio State which would be suspect at best. What better way to poke a stick in the eye of the BCS majordomos than have Hawaii – the only undefeated team in the whole bunch – come in and win, thus casting a huge shadow over the entire, playoff-lacking joke of a championship.

Well, it looks like that did not quite happen, and any future controversies about undefeated teams with weak schedules not being invited to the big dance have been, I think, precluded tonight.

UPDATE: Man, upon further review, I wonder if I may have UNDERSTATED what is happening tonight. This is the sort of cataclysmic horror out of which new metaphors are born, such as: “The red hot knife sliced the stick of butter like Georgia tore through Hawaii in 2008.”