Cowboys To Play Purdue In Heart of Dallas Bowl

Photo Attribution: US Presswire

Tis the season…

In the last 24 hours OSU slipped from “might play Georgia in the Cotton Bowl if we beat Baylor” to “yup, we’re playing Purdue in the zombie Cotton Bowl.”

So that’s fun. Here are five more thoughts about OSU’s bowl destination.

1. OK, so the Big 12 has loose tie-ins to bowls, right? Some are stronger than others — obviously the champ has to go to the Fiesta Bowl. Here’s how they generally go:

1st place in Big 12 – Fiesta
2nd – Cotton
3rd – Alamo
4th – Buffalo Wild Wings
5th – Holiday
6th – Meineke Car Care
7th – Pinstripe
8th – Heart of Dallas

So OSU finishes tied for third (with Texas) in conference play and drops to the “8th place bowl”?

These bowls make business decisions, I get that. If you’re close in conference standings and a bowl is choosing from a team 10 miles away and a team 100000 miles away, they’re going to choose the former. That’s just smart, you want your bowl to fill up, look good on TV, and make a ton of money.

But how big of a slap in the face is it that the Buffalo Wild Wings and Holiday chose TCU and Baylor over OSU?

It’s not like Ft. Worth and Waco are eons closer to those destinations, nor does either have a traditionally vibrant (or large) travel reputation.

My only guess is that the bowls went with the hotter two teams, even though OSU finished ahead of both of them, which is fine, that’s their choice.

But then why even have tie-ins to what place teams finish[1. Note: the “tie-in” is that the Cotton gets first choice so they generally pick the second best team, and so on and so forth…just to clarify.]? Just say “the champ goes to the Fiesta” and everything else is free reign. Don’t give me this facade that better teams go to good bowls if that’s not what’s actually going to happen.

2. When people ask, we should just say “yeah, we played in a New Year’s Day Bowl in Dallas. It’s cool.

3. This will be the third Heart of Dallas Bowl in history and we can’t even say we’re the best team to ever play in it — that would be 12-1 Houston last year, which beat Penn State.

4. This has nothing to do with our bowl, but the most frustrating thing to me about this year is that it should have been a jumping off point for a Big 12 title run in 2013 and yet we STILL don’t have a QB1 that everybody is 100% behind.

We accomplished nothing on that front.

5. Purdue, in a bowl. I know how that ends.