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2018: Bowl Picks Post-Mortem

OK, a couple of quick thoughts on today's picks

1) I swear to goodness that the Outback Bowl simply exists to make me look bad. 

Two years in a row now, I have picked MSU to go to Tampa, just to see MSU fall to a lower bowl for dubious reasons. This irritates most for two reasons: 1) I hate being wrong. 2) If you apply logic and reason to a situation and the opposite result actually happens, it to me just makes the world look like a chaotic, unfair mess, which is unsettling. Grrrrrrr.

2) This still seems like a really stupid decision for the Outback Bowl, from a business point of view.

It will be interesting to see if more comes out about how this went down. It seems to me that if the current bowl contracts are actually contracts, the Outbowl very well could be up crap creek next year, and frankly, they deserve to be. If teams like MSU, Ohio State, Penn State, and Nebraska are not available to them next year, well good luck with a 6-6 Indiana or Minnesota team. If the Big Ten somehow lets them out of the contract, then why bother having a "contract" at all. Terrible.

3) This is a snub to MSU

Did MSU earn the Outback Bowl? No, not really. But, at the end of the day, the Outback picked an 8-4 Iowa team that was there 2 years ago and whose biggest win was over Iowa State over 7-5 MSU who plays in the East and beat Penn State on the road. And, they did so but putting themselves at risk next year, as I explained above. That makes it a snub.

4) That all said, this is really not that bad for MSU

Playing against Mississippi State in Tampa might not have gone well, and might have gone really, really poorly. But, not getting the Pinstripe Bowl I will take as a win. Also, I like the match-up with Oregon more than the potential one with Stanford that was rumored. So, that's all cool. I think it will be fun.

5) The Committee did an awful job with the NY6. Awful.

Over the past several years, the Committee has done a pretty good job lining up compelling match-ups in the NY6 Bowls. This year they pretty much screwed the pooch. The Final Four is as expected and fine, and the Rose Bowl was automatic, but the other three games could not have been worse. Granted, the match-ups are exactly as I and many other predicted, but they are still all terrible. The committee should have set up Michigan-Georgia, LSU-Texas, and UCF-Florida. Period. I don't care where. Those would all have been worth watching. None of the current games are at all compelling. Miserable, piss-poor job, even if it was predictable.

So, much like Selection Sunday, we now can shift from bracketology to actual match-up analysis, and that should be fun. I really like the Bowl season and I am looking forward to digging into these match-ups more. 

With that, on to Santa Clara! Go State, Beat the Ducks!

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