It's official: College Football defense is dead.

Let's have a moment of silence for the dearly departed defenses of College football. At least, any College football outside of the SEC....

(West Virginia routs Clemson in record-setting Orange Bowl, AP via ESPN.com)

The West Virginia Mountaineers were tough to slow down, and only the Discover Orange Bowl mascot could stop Darwin Cook.

Geno Smith tied the record for any bowl game with six touchdown passes, and the Mountaineers set a bowl scoring record Wednesday night with their high-powered offense. But safety Cook made the pivotal play by returning a fumble 99 yards for a touchdown to break the game open and help rout Clemson 70-33.

You read that right. 70-33. Nevermind the 70, there was a time that giving up 33 pts in a bowl game was embarrassing, not to mention a fireable offense for a defensive coordinator.

The temptation is to take a look at the offenses and simply declare them to be more advanced, with better athletes, but a closer look reveals that defensive fundamentals are poor. The basic skill of tackling is almost non-exsistent these days. There's a temptation to blame ESPN, and SportsCenter, for glorifying the big hit on their amped-up nightly highlight shows, but that's only part of the problem. The real issue is that, in an effort to slow down these hyper-fast offenses, coaches spend more time on scheme then they do on fundamentals. The idea that the players should have learned how to tackle in High School. If you've watched any High School football at all you realize this is a fallacy.

The good news is that there are still teams out there playing good defense. Granted, with the sagging of the OU defense of late, they're mostly in the SEC, but they are there. The bad news is, when these teams square-off, the fans grouse that the score is 9-6, and not 99-66.

While I would have liked to see OSU play LSU in the B(c)S championship, at least you know that there are a couple of schools in this game who understand what it means to wrap-up and tackle. We haven't seen that much anywhere else this bowl season. (As a matter of fact, in the few cases where the scores have been low it's been more about bad offensive play by bad teams than any stellar defensive performances.)

I'm not sure what the answer is totally (better coaching for one, not allowing defenses to watch SportsCenter for two) but until it's found by the rest of America the SEC is going to laugh it's way to championships every year.

Oh, wait...they already are....