Good evening football fans. Before I jump into tomorrow’s bowl and the whole pirate explanation, there were 9 bowl or playoff games on Saturday. The FCS semifinals finished as expected with James Madison (64/1) and defending champions and undefeated North Dakota State (101/9) rolling to the January 11 title game in Frisco, Texas. These teams are a combined 29-1 and this should be a really good game. Weather won’t be an issue (pretty sure James Madison is glad the game is not in Fargo, don’t ya know), and these teams will match up well. I’ll have an in depth analysis in January for this game. The other FCS game, the Celebration Bowl, was a shootout with NC A&T (159/42) defeating Alcorn State (120/21) 64-44.
In the FBS, San Diego State, Liberty (who became the 3rd team this year to earn their first bowl victory, and the second to play in their first ever bowl game), Florida Atlantic, Arkansas State, Washington, and App State were winners. The GCR was 2-1 in the FCS and 4-2 in the FBS taking the bowl season to 7-4, 5-3 in the FBS.
But now it’s time to turn our attention to Monday’s bowl game. Marshall (95/88), 2nd in the C-USA East will take on Central Florida (42), 2nd in the American East, in the Gasparilla Bowl played in Tampa. I had no idea what a Gasparilla was, but found it there is a festival in January with all kind of pirate themed activities (Bigly, I know you want to go) aptly called Tampa’s Gasparilla Pirate Festival. In 2020 the festival will be January 25 with a parade and everything. Sounds like a blast. The festival and the bowl game are named for a potentially mythical pirate named Jose Gaspar nicknamed the “last of the buccaneers.” So, the Thundering Herd will attack the Knights in an event named for a fictitious guy over a month before a parade named for the same guy tomorrow at 2:30 Eastern. Nothing surreal about this at all. Both teams played and lost to the same top 25 team (Cincinnati), both have winning records against bowl-bound teams (Marshall – 5-3, UCF – 4-2) and both lost to a team they had no business losing to (Middle Tennessee State and Tulsa, respectively). So they sound fairly even through all of that, but that’s what Gaspar wants you to think. In reality, UCF is a much better team and should win handily. Vegas says the Knights -16.0 and the GCR agrees at 68.3%.
The schedule for this week is pretty busy. Tomorrow night, I’ll post again with the results of the fake pirate bowl and the up to date predictions for the Hawaii Bowl (BYU at Hawaii). I’ll post again Christmas night with that update and predictions for the Independence (Miami and Louisiana Tech) and the Quick Lane (Pittsburgh and Eastern Michigan) bowls. Thursday night I’ll repeat all of that for the 5 Friday bowls. Friday night, repeat with predictions for Saturday’s bowls including the semi-finals.
Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, Happy Solstice, Happy Kwanzaa to everyone (pick whichever one you like best). Please send comments or questions, and please share with others. If you don’t like us on Facebook or Twitter, we are out there. Thanks for the help in getting the GCR blog started let’s get ready for the 13 bowl games this week.
G
