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C-USA renews agreement with Beef 'O' Brady's Bowl

April, 27, 2010 Apr 276:11PM ET
By Graham Watson

Conference USA has signed an agreement to continue playing in the Beef ‘O’ Brady’s Bowl St. Petersburg in Florida through the 2013 college football season.

Conference USA will pit a bowl eligible team against a team from the Big East. The game will be televised on ESPN.

This year’s game will mark the bowl’s third. The Big East has won the first two games.

Last season, Rutgers defeated UCF 45-24 in front of a crowd of 28,000. In the inaugural game in 2008, South Florida defeated Memphis 41-14 at Tropicana Field.

"St. Petersburg and the Beef 'O' Brady’s Bowl have provided a first-class event in a fantastic location to reward our teams and their fans for a great season,” Conference USA Commissioner Britton Banowsky said in a statement. We are thrilled to continue highlighting our teams on ESPN against a quality opponent."

The game also is a backup bowl agreement for the Sun Belt Conference, which will provide a team if one of the tie-ins cannot be filled.

Good stuff. I was hearing rumors.

http://www.dnj.com/article/20100428/BLUE...f+Sun+Belt

excerpt:

The secondary tie-in agreements with the Pizza Bowl and Beef 'O' Brady's Bowl are both four-year deals. The Big Ten and Mid-American Conference are the primary leagues for the Pizza Bowl. The Big East Conference and Conference USA have primary agreements with the Beef 'O' Brady's Bowl.

The Mid-American Conference is the first secondary league for a PapaJohns.com Bowl vacancy, but a Sun Belt school can instead be chosen if it offers a good geographic fit to the game.

All this bowl jargon provides a load of information to swallow, but here's the short of it. The Sun Belt has drastically improved its bowl opportunities — doubled and perhaps tripled, in fact — in one offseason.

To some extent, it was expected since some regional bowl contracts expired this past year. But the Sun Belt still had to make a strong play for them, and its football programs had to show they were worthy.

In the last four years, the Sun Belt has produced four bowl-eligible teams in three separate seasons. Now more Sun Belt teams could be rewarded to the degree of comparable conferences.

It's a good day to be a Sun Belt football fan.

So what are the odds on one of the primary's not making this bowl?

I know the Pizaa Pizza bowl we will have a pretty good shot.

(04-28-2010 09:50 AM)OwlFamily Wrote: [ -> ]So what are the odds on one of the primary's not making this bowl?

I know the Pizaa Pizza bowl we will have a pretty good shot.

Don't know, but I'd much rather travel to St. Pete than Dee-troit.

Love me some St. Pete Beach

I'd rather travel to Detroit than watch a Big East and a CUSA play in the St. Pete Bowl. It's only been played twice but so far hasn't had a problem having a team from each league.

Thing is we have to to have more than 2 bowl eligible teams... Troy to GMAC and MTSU to NO Bowl (vice versa).

So will FAU and ULL step up to the plate? Perhaps stAte?

(04-28-2010 12:42 PM)troy4ever21 Wrote: [ -> ]Thing is we have to to have more than 2 bowl eligible teams... Troy to GMAC and MTSU to NO Bowl (vice versa).

This goes back to winning more OOC games. There has been enough separation within the conference schedule that all it would take is another OOC win by a couple teams. As long as we're avoiding 3-way ties at the top, we should get plenty of teams in the post season.

Did the 6-6 AQ over a 7-5 or higher non-AQ to a Bowl game ever get ratified? That might be key to us getting a third SBC school into a Bowl game.

To my knowledge it hasn't. If there had been 35 bowl games last year, all but one of the 6-6 teams that didn't make it in (Notre Dame, Louisiana-Monroe, Louisiana-Lafayette) would have made it.

If the rule regarding 6-6 AQ conference teams had been in effect last year, the following games would have had to have different results for it to matter:

up to 2 of Wake Forest-North Carolina State, Duke-Wake Forest, Duke-North Carolina State
Kansas-Missouri or Kansas-Kansas State (Kansas State played two FCS schools)
Purdue-Michigan
Mississippi State-Mississippi
Washington-Arizona State