Green Gang Blog: Waters On Right Track With Bowl Flexibility

By Stephen Howard, July 23, 2009 - 10:15 a.m.

Let’s take a trip back in time, all the way back to the year 2001, when the word “co-champion” might have been a four-letter word to the fledgling football league known as the Sun Belt.

On Oct. 13, a 5-0 Middle Tennessee squad, fresh off a win over the SEC’s Vanderbilt, waltzed into Fouts Field with a high powered offense and an impressive swagger that had been racking up 557 yards per game and heaps of well-deserved acclaim.

The Mean Green jumped out early and held on for dear life as MTSU made a furious fourth-quarter comeback. With the Raiders driving late, NT’s Darrell Daniels sacked Blue Raider quarterback Wes Counts to stall the drive and essentially give the Mean Green the win.

That one seemingly innocuous sack just six weeks into the season would seal the postseason fates of both squads. North Texas would finish the regular season 5-6, but due to that tiebreaker win over the Blue Raiders would represent the league at the inaugural New Orleans Bowl.

Middle Tennessee, which would go on to knock off Connecticut and fall just 30-14 at LSU, would sit at home with a record of 8-3 – a victim of the Sun Belt having just one bowl tie in, and absolutely no flexibility in sending teams to other bowls.

The Blue Raiders were unquestionably a bowl quality team, and were a victim of what has happened to multiple Sun Belt teams. As a matter of fact, in its eight years of football, the Sun Belt has had 19 bowl eligible teams, nine of which did not see the postseason.

Commissioner Wright Waters recently said at the online Sun Belt Media Days that he is exploring options that would give the league flexibility in which team it sends to the New Orleans Bowl, a proposition that could really give the conference a leg up.

Geographically, Water’s idea makes perfect sense. Let’s say that Florida Atlantic edges out, I don’t know, North Texas for the league title in 2009. Under the current format, the Owls are obligated to haul the 825 miles (easily a 13 hour drive) from Boca Raton, Fla., to the Crescent City. It is doubtful that many FAU fans would make that trek, and it would also be a crapshoot for North Texas to get another bowl invite.

But if Waters gets his way, FAU would be free to accept a bid to the St. Petersburg Bowl, which has a Sun Belt tie in, and North Texas would head to the Big Easy. Flexibility, once again, solves the problem.

But Waters’ idea also works for matchups. Time for another hypothetical. Let’s say North Texas goes 11-1 next year, and the Ragin’ Cajuns end up 9-3. Both teams would be considered strong bowl squads, but under the current agreement North Texas would head to the New Orleans Bowl to take on an “also-ran” from Conference USA, and ULL would be on its own to find another bowl – possibly the Independence Bowl, but we know how that turned out last year.

Instead, Waters would send Louisiana-Lafayette just 90 minutes down the road to the Superdome to take on an evenly matched Conference USA squad. As for the Mean Green, whose 11-1 record makes them more attractive to bigger bowls, we would be free to make a splash in the national pool by taking down a team from a BCS conference in any number of available bowls.

The key is flexibility, of which the Sun Belt has none in its current bowl lineup. Beyond the New Orleans Bowl nothing is concrete for the league, and this is a step in the right direction for curing that.

Kudos to Commissioner Waters and his staff, and here’s one Mean Green fan who hopes it works.

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