{"id":2518,"date":"2009-12-15T08:57:39","date_gmt":"2009-12-15T13:57:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.madduxsports.com\/blog\/?p=2518"},"modified":"2009-12-11T15:59:08","modified_gmt":"2009-12-11T20:59:08","slug":"bowl-games-the-not-so-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.madduxsports.com\/blog\/bowl-games-the-not-so-good-2518\/","title":{"rendered":"Bowl Games &#8211; The Not So Good"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday was the good &#8211; the six best bowl games. Today, the bad &#8211; the five worst bowl games:<\/p>\n<p>1. <strong>New Orleans Bowl <\/strong>&#8211; Southern Mississippi and Middle Tennessee offer a couple of interesting factors &#8211; most significant, this is the final game for Southern Miss running back Damion Fletcher. Despite that, it&#8217;s hard to imagine a pairing that could be less inspiring and less captivating to anyone from the casual fan to the avid follower. Most bowls give us a reason to care. This one just plain doesn&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<p>2. <strong>Alamo Bowl <\/strong>&#8211; Michigan State and Texas Tech should have been an interesting game, but it won&#8217;t be this year. Michigan State has all sorts of troubles &#8211; eight players are suspended for this game after a dorm fight. Texas Tech hasn&#8217;t had a great year, but the one thing we know for sure is that they can pass and that they are going to do that a whole lot. That&#8217;s going to make for a terrible game, because Michigan State ranks 103rd in pass defense. A distracted, under-manned team doesn&#8217;t make for a good game at the best of times, but when the weaknesses of that team play exactly into the strength of their opponents you have the potential for a disaster.<\/p>\n<p>3. <strong>Little Caesars Pizza Bowl <\/strong>&#8211; The name alone is reason enough to hate this bowl. That&#8217;s not the only problem with the Marshall &#8211; Ohio matchup, though. Ohio is okay &#8211; they won their division in the MAC &#8211; but they are far from interesting to watch, and they don&#8217;t do anything particularly well. Marshall had a rocky year, finishing the season with a humiliating blowout loss to UTEP that dropped them to 6-6 and prompted head coach Mark Snyder to resign effective immediately. Marshall at their best isn&#8217;t much to watch right now, and there is almost no chance of them being at their best.<\/p>\n<p>4.<strong> International Bowl<\/strong> &#8211; South Florida is in the midst of an ugly collapse &#8211; they have lost five of their last seven. Northern Ilinois is a 7-5 team that lost to pretty much every decent team it played. The game is played in the Rogers Centre in Toronto &#8211; aka the SkyDome &#8211; one of the uglier barns there is outside of the Metrodome. This game just isn&#8217;t going to be good.<\/p>\n<p>5. <strong>Outback Bowl <\/strong>&#8211; Northwestern deserves some respect &#8211; they had a couple of nice upsets and were better than expected. Their reward for that is playing an Auburn squad that is a total mess. They lost five of their last seven, and have been the antithesis of competitive down the stretch. This might be a decent game, but I sincerely doubt it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday was the good &#8211; the six best bowl games. Today, the bad &#8211; the five worst bowl games: 1. New Orleans Bowl &#8211; Southern Mississippi and Middle Tennessee offer a couple of interesting factors &#8211; most significant, this is the final game for Southern Miss running back Damion Fletcher. Despite that, it&#8217;s hard to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[200],"tags":[587,9531],"class_list":["post-2518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-college-football","tag-bowl-games","tag-college-football"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.madduxsports.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.madduxsports.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.madduxsports.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.madduxsports.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.madduxsports.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2518"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.madduxsports.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2518\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2519,"href":"https:\/\/www.madduxsports.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2518\/revisions\/2519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.madduxsports.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.madduxsports.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.madduxsports.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}