You didn’t think that headline up there was a reference to the Holiday Bowl did you? It’s not, because Thursday night at Qualcomm Stadium is gravy.

No doubt, 8-4 looks a whole lot better than 7-5 and it would sure be nice to raise the bar on Oklahoma’s best win from Conference USA champ Tulsa to Pac-10 runner-up Oregon. But it’s still a game mired in significance only because Sooner fans love their football.

Nobody will not go to OU because it lost the Holiday Bowl, just as no loss will take the shine off coming back from a 2-3 start and no win will deliver a new feel-good spin to finishing third in the Big 12 South.

The Transcript’s John Shinn is already in San Diego and your friendly sports editor arrives Tuesday night and we’re going to cover the heck out of the game. But we’ll do it knowing little of what happens, barring horrible injury, will have much bearing on next season.

Sooner basketball on the other hand …

Wednesday night, the Oral Roberts men visit Lloyd Noble Center and I don’t mean to scare anybody but OU beat Tulsa 62-53 back on Nov. 30 and three nights later ORU bashed Tulsa 68-52.

The Golden Eagles can play.

Meanwhile, the Sooner women are at No. 18 New Mexico Friday and the Lobos should be plenty hot approaching the tip, having lost to OU 74-63 Nov. 16 in the third round of the Preseason WNIT on the very same court.

If not must wins, both would be unfathomable losses.

Where the men are concerned, defense is always the problem when you allow 24 of 28 shooting inside the arc and near 70 percent from everywhere. And yet, one of the real ironies of the Kelvin Sampson experience — the way he looks at his program and the way Sooner fans look at his program — is they’re never upset about the same thing.

Sampson questioned his players’ manhood following OU’s 92-68 All-College loss to West Virginia. But the fans, or at least those with a perpetual bone to pick with their coach after each foundation-shaking loss, are rarely bothered most by the Sooners’ alleged lack of toughness. Instead, they wonder why all these years later, they can’t win that game 94-92 or, at the very least, lose it 92-86. All that talent, it seems like they should score more than 68 points the same night Taj Gray goes for 31.

The funny thing is, both sides are right.

OU guarded lousy, but breaking 80 points twice and 70 just three times against a schedule that includes Samford, Binghamton, Belmont, Tulsa, Coppin State and Southern is equally preposterous.

The Sooner women, on the other hand, are a momentary mess.

For snippets of time, a 10-minute second-half stretch against Oral Roberts and a 10-minute first-half stretch against UCLA, one a decent team and the other darn good, the Sooners have made the Elite Eight appear a lowly goal. Then they go out against Michigan State, even at home, and make the Big 12’s first division look like a best-case scenario.