Face the Facts: Why Your Favorite Lesser Tier Bowl Game Is Overrated

After going after your favorite Nebraska fast-food restaurants, your favorite national fast food chain, your favorite frozen pizza chain, your favorite national pizza chain, and your favorite regional pizza chain. We’ve moved on past food now and now bring you the review of why your favorite less bowl game destination is a dud.

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Holiday Bowl

Photo by John Cordes/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

San Diego is a lovely city to visit sometime. The holiday season is not necessarily that “sometime.” Nor is a bowl game on December 28 in the middle of what is often times still a work day. Add in that it is in a pathetic late 60’s era multi-purpose abomination of a stadium, and you have the perfect culmination of “overrated.”

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Gator Bowl

Photo by Mary Holt/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

What sane person sees Jacksonville, Florida as the bowl destination and thinks “Hooray, we get a Florida bowl!”?! Better question, what person sees a potential trip to Jacksonville and actually finds that appealing? Simply because it isn’t the panhandle is not reason enough to justify the trip. If you are going to spend money to go to Florida over the holidays, actually go somewhere worth visiting.

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Citrus Bowl

Photo by Roy K. Miller/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

The stadium is a dump, the theme parks are an expensive nightmare, and it is a beach-less part of Florida. All told you are going to be blowing thousands and thousands of dollars to be part of a suffocating theme park crowd where the food is mediocre and overpriced, your kids have two to three melt-downs per day, and you spend most of the time in lines. Instead of enjoying a beach, maybe you get some pool time in, but the park time makes sure you have a crappy farmer’s tan most of the winter if you at least manage to avoid sunburns.

Finally, you get to the game. The stadium is absolutely awful and should have been torn down and replaced. You tried to do this on the cheap because of the theme park, hotel, airline flights, and food costs already hit too much of you wallet, but somehow got screwed and end up too close to the other team’s sections and have to put up with whatever annoying chant they have. Finally, your team is going to lose. Yeah, this bowl game sucks. Good news is at least you had a good, but not “great,” season in order to make this one.

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Las Vegas Bowl

It was finally poised to make it to the big-leagues with a shiny new NFL stadium and a rotating PAC-12 versus SEC/B1G slate. Now we have a global pandemic and the bowl game likely being cancelled. A whole lot of hype for nothing if you ask me. Besides, there are already plenty of B1G versus PAC-12 bowl games as it is.

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Alamo Bowl

Photo by Tim Warner/Getty Images

The Big Ten doesn’t even play in this bowl game anymore. That alone is enough for it to be overrated. Add onto that it is in a stadium that was built to try and lure an NFL team, and it then failed at that task, and that’s enough for us.

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Music City Bowl

Photo by Frederick Breedon/Getty Images

I hear Nashville is a pretty great city. I would love to visit it someday. What will never draw me there is a late December game against a shitty SEC opponent in an outdoor stadium. Call me a wuss, I do not care. I have happily sat through many a blizzard game in November in my life. Bowl games should be in warm weather climates or in a domed stadium unless it is making a team like Bama play outside in a blizzard. This is not one of those fun fantasy scenarios. It is a crappy bowl opponent who managed an eight to nine win season at best. The television is great for this scenario.

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Pinstripe Bowl

Photo by Adam Hunger/Getty Images

The negatives of this bowl include it’s in a baseball stadium, in late December on an unheated field, in New York City in the winter and after Christmas, and against an awful ACC opponent. Why on earth does this game even exist? Not only is it in a God damn baseball stadium, it isn’t even a historic one! It is played in the modern monstrosity of Yankee Stadium after it was built anew. Just stop playing it already or at least move it to MetLife so we don’t have a repeat of the 2017 Iowa-Boston College debacle.

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Quick Lane Bowl

Photo by Scott W. Grau/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

Ford Field is an underrated gem of an NFL stadium. The Quick Lane Bowl is not a similar underrated gem of a bowl game. You face a MAC opponent and are a mere six win team to make this game in all likelihood.

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Bahamas Bowl

You get a trip to the Bahamas out of it. If you were there in 2014, you even got a chance to see what almost became the biggest bowl comeback in history. Beyond that, there isn’t much of anything else to say about this bowl game.

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Gasparilla Bowl

Photo by Brian Blanco/Getty Images

The most interesting thing about this game is the sponsor. The most interesting thing to happen during this game is the on-field reporter ignoring the “Do Not Climb On Lawnmower” sign on live television while he climbs onto the Bad Boy Mower. However, they aren’t the primary sponsor anymore so this bowl game doesn’t even have that going for it. As for the game itself, why would you spend the money to go to the Tampa area and leave the beach bar to go to the game?

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Redbox Bowl

Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images

The only appealing thing about this bowl game is the jokes about the latest sponsor. Other than that, it is in Santa Clara, California shortly before New Years, but not even on New Years. The teams either failed to become bowl eligible on wins and got in via lack of options or had a lackluster six to seven win season. Unless you got the hook-up for a tour of the Apple HQ or something, why on earth would you blow the money to visit for this game and waste time attending it? Either go up to Sonoma/Napa for the holidays, or stay home and maybe watch this on your television is you don’t have time to pick up a DVD from your nearest Redbox location.

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