The college bowl schedule kicks off on Saturday, with an ESPN doubleheader of Nevada-Arizona (New Mexico Bowl) and Utah State-Toledo (Famous Idaho Potato Bowl), starting at 1 PM ET. It’s definitely a warmup for better matchups down the line, but it’s also the due date for a lot of people—myself included—to get their bowl pool selections in—so we jump in with a look at what to expect tomorrow.
This past Saturday night I was in Lucas Oil Stadium for the Big Ten Championship Game with a friend of mine. As Wisconsin’s 70-31 pounding of Nebraska got out of control, we started to look at the BCS rankings on his I-phone to see if there was any chance Northern Illinois could make it to the Orange Bowl.
We identified teams the Huskies they would have to pass in the rankings to achieve automatic qualifying status. The five battleground states, if you will, were identified as Kent, UCLA, Texas, Michigan and Nebraska. NIU had to win four of the five battles. This also assumed the Huskies—21st coming into the week—would nudge past #20 Boise to become the top midmajor on the board. With most of the experts, like CBS Sports’ Jerry Palm and ESPN’s Brad Edwards still saying NIU would come up short, and even non-expert locales like this site feeling this way on Friday, as we examined the data on Saturday night, Northern Illinois’ path suddenly looked open.