Picking Every Bowl: Frisco Football Classic, North Texas vs. Miami (Ohio)

Frisco Football Classic
December 23
North Texas (6-6) vs. Miami, Ohio (6-6), Toyota Stadium, Frisco, Texas, 3:30 p.m., ESPN
Miami -2.5 – O/U 54.5

If 41 bowl games weren’t enough for you, this is your game. In the era of “everyone gets a trophy,” the NCAA decided that two teams couldn’t be left out of the bowl parade — not when 82 teams were getting to play and 46 teams were ineligible. So it created this 42nd game, the Frisco Football “Classic.” As an adjective, “classic” means “judged over a period of time to be of the highest quality and outstanding of its kind,” and as a noun it means, “a work of art of recognized and established value.” So this bowl’s quickly chosen name is simply an attempt to get us to see it as a truly viable bowl. In so many ways, it’s simply forgettable. North Texas definitely earned its way into the postseason by winning its last five games, including a drubbing of Conference USA champion UTSA in the season finale. Miami plays in the lowly MAC, which means that it lost to teams that it should have beaten, and beat teams it should have lost to. The Red Hawks are the nation’s 10th best passing team, but they struggle to run the ball effectively. On the other side is the North Texas Mean Green, which is the country’s fourth-best rushing offense, but also which struggles to pass the ball effectively. Both teams are fairly even in both phases of the defense — meaning, that both are average at best at defending both the pass and the run. Don’t expect too many fireworks or spectacular plays, though it should be a fairly competitive game. Since this is a de facto home game for North Texas (Frisco is about 25 miles from Denton), give the Mean Green the edge.
Prediction: North Texas 31-28
Result: Miami 27-14
So much for North Texas’s home advantage and the MAC’s ineptitude in bowl games. Both halves were close, but Miami won both of them. The Red Hawks took a 20-14 lead into the locker room, and they scored the only points in the second half. North Texas threatened, but the Mean Green always seemed to make critical mistakes when they got close to scoring, including an interception in the end zone.

Record:
Bowl season: SU – 7-7; ATS – 4-10-0; O/U – 6-8-0
Overall: SU – 601-189; ATS – 373-331-6; O/U – 339-359-12

About Douglas Blaine

Capnpen is a writer who was a newspaper and magazine journalist in a previous life. A college journalism major, he now works as an English teacher, but gets his writing fix by blogging about a variety of topics, including politics, religion, movies and television. When he's not working or blogging, Capnpen spends time with his family, plays a little golf (badly) and loves to learn about virtually anything.

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