Smoke from the Chimney: Camellia Bowl

So, the Camellia it will be.  I am happy for our seniors to be able to play in a bowl game and hopefully get a win.  And, the team gets extra practices and a chance to put the off-season on a slightly more positive outlook than what it sits on today, which is pretty ugly.

Beyond that, it is of minimal excitement.  If you are as old as I am, you remember when a bowl bid was a big deal.  The MAC only got one (and sometimes got none).  Today, a bowl bid is the softest landing in sports.  There are 76 bids out of 125 (or so) FBS teams...way more than half.  It is on the order of the NBA and NHL, where 16 out of 30 make the next round.  I think a lot of the excitement is left over from before.  In my world, you'd need 8 or 9 wins to make a bowl game, but I am not running a TV network that needs to put something on TV.

The Camellia is the state flower of Alabama.  We are playing South Alabama, which is in its first bowl game at 6-6.  This is their 5th year with a football program and only second as full FBS members.  Also, they will be playing near home, Montgomery, Alabama.  The game is being played in the Cramton Bowl, which is best known as the one-time home of the Blue-Grey game.  Wikipedia says the stadium is built on the former site of a sanitary landfill.

More to come as we learn about South Alabama and Montgomery and the Cramton bowl and the whole thing.

In other MAC News:

A really nice matchup was set up with NIU playing Marshall in the Boca Raton Bowl, which is a really nice matchup for MAC and will be a very watchable game.

UT will play Arkansas Sate in the Go Daddy Bowl.
CMU will play WKU in the Bahamas, in what I suspect was the player's first choice.
WMU will play Air Force in the Potato Bowl.

The only MAC-eligible team to not get a bid was OU, which was 6-6.