GameAbove Sports Bowl, Rate Bowl Recap and Reaction
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Northwestern and Minnesota both win their bowl games, and isn’t that the nicest thing we can say about the whole endeavor.
A win in a third rate
cold weatherbowl game is still better than no bowl invite, or a loss in a third rate bowl game.
—Midnight Rambler
GameAbove Sports Bowl
Northwestern Wildcats 34, Central Michigan Chippewas 7
The Chips’ offense started slow, then sputtered: three turnovers (an INT and two fumbles) by QB Joey Labas* on three consecutive possessions turned into three Northwestern touchdowns. If 21-0 wasn’t “over” enough at halftime, in the third quarter CMU finally brought in dynamic running QB Angel Flores…who promptly fumbled himself, only for Northwestern DB Braden Turner to pull off the ol’ fumble-six with a stumbling 47-yard return.
* Kind of… wants me to note that Labas completed 84% of his passes (21/25 for 178 and 1 INT), an objectively hilarious line.
This game had all the ugliness you’d expect from December 26 in Detroit: we got C’M00N at the end of the first quarter, which Northwestern flailing about on offense, before they seemingly remembered “Oh yeah, this is a mid-tier MAC program,” turned the Turnover Dial to “MAXIMUM”, and leaned on WR Griffin Wilde (10 rec., 95 yards, 2 TDs) and DE Aidan Hubbard (3 sacks), easily the best players on their respective sides of the field, to get open and to the quarterback, respectively, with reckless abandon.
There’s not much to be teased out here: Northwestern thumped a middling MAC program—allowing only a garbage time score—to make it six bowl wins in a row. That’s objectively Fine, and any Northwestern fan pissing in your Cheerios about the quality of the opponent or the poor showing of backup QB Ryan Boe can fuck off. (Fans of other Big Ten teams can still mock you, as that is the entire defining ethos of Off Tackle Empire dot blogspot dot biz.)
Rate Bowl
Minnesota Golden Gophers 20, New Mexico Lobos 17 (OT)
For about an hour after this game, ESPN—which runs damn near every bowl game, including this one—did not have a boxscore or play-by-play available for the Rate Bowl.
It was the right decision.
New Mexico, one of the pleasant surprises, alongside Hawai’i, of the 2025 Mountain West—a conference that was otherwise an unmitigated disaster of preannounced defections to the new Pac-8 and an overwrought, algorithm-decided conference championship game that just ended in Boise State winning another home game to a collective shrug and sigh of all involved—put up a game fight against the Golden Gophers. The Lobos’ novel approach to “What if two quarterbacks, but neither can really pass all that well” proved largely ineffective against a Gopher defense best described as “competent,” staying in the game largely because after Minnesota went up by a seemingly insurmountable eight points in the fourth quarter, the Lobos’ Damon Bankston prompted returned a kickoff 100 yards before HC Jason Eck pulled this out of his bag:
You are reading that correctly: with 13 minutes left in this bowl game, Minnesota led just 14-12.
Of course, after the Gopher defense forced the Lobos to settle for a field goal in the first overtime, Drake Lindsey—who…boy. there’s a conversation to be had about how much he knows what’s going on in a given moment—lobbed this off his back foot:
That’s a helluva grab from Jalen Smith to win it.
As the lead quote from one of our esteemed Gopher commenters implies, winning your third-tier bowl game is always better than losing it. Minnesota did not lose their bowl game, thus continuing one of those more amusing facets of the academic, athletic*, social, and spiritual success they have enjoyed under the PJ Fleck tenure.
* Quick Lane, Holiday, Quick Lane, Outback, Rate, Pinstripe, Quick Lane, Mayo, Rate
WhiteSpeedReceiver: Why watch one Northwestern game in the day when you can watch two?!
Jesus, that was definitely a B1G West football game.
Minnesota had just enough talent to overcome a massive deficiency on the OL to beat a very frisky New Mexico squad. Everybody wants to laugh about Sun Belt or Mountain West taking a B1G scalp until it’s your head that they’re staring at. The defense was up for the job, but Jesus does the offense need to work on a few things to make sure we’re not in the Rate Bowl again next Lexus December to Remember.
Anthony Smith, Maverick Baranowski, and friends were everywhere except one kick return, and that was really fun to watch. And the offense had a couple sparks HELLO JALEN SMITH and some decent plays from Darius Taylor and Drake Lindsey, but OH MY GOD. When you can’t get consistent push or protection against a (again, VERY WELL-COACHED) Mountain West team, you need to figure a few things out quickly.
MNW: I’m sure you can at least look forward to Eck very intentionally staying at New Mexico one more year to be the candidate-in-waiting for the wisconsin job next year.
We’ll undoubtedly have more to say in just a little bit about Saturday’s games, both bowl and playoff. In the meantime, the conference sits at 4-0 in bowl season, ensconced atop the tallest point in Illinois that is the Bowl Challenge Cup summit.
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