BOWLNANZA!: The Poinsettia Bowl

Northern Illinois (7-5) vs. #24 TCU (10-2)

In one of my favorite quirks of the bowl season, this game will be played at the home of the Chargers, Qualcomm Stadium, between the alma-maters of LaDainian Tomlinson (TCU) and Michael Turner (NIU). And that's about the most interesting thing about this game, sadly. It's easy to forget that the non-BCS team picked to crash the party during the preseason was in fact not Boise State, but the Horned Frogs of Texas Christian. I thought they could do it too, but had written them off after week 1, where I watched them play about even with a Baylor team that, while improved, was still Baylor. They dropped games to BYU and Texas Tech early on, but lately they've been playing as well as any team in the country. Their last three games have been wins over San Diego State (52-0), Colorado State (45-14), and Air Force (38-14) that might even be more dominating than those lopsided scores suggest.

On the Northern Illinois side, the Huskies have gotten their act together too, coming off a 27-0 win at Eastern Michigan that was about as statistically dominating as any of those TCU victories. This comes after a solid but "closer than the score" 31-10 win against MAC champions Central Michigan. Still, the NIU season as a whole has a few warts on it; they played about even with a subpar Toledo team, and wound up losing 17-13, and there was that notorious 16-14 (and it should've been worse) loss against Western Michigan where Garrett Wolfe's Heisman hopes were shot dead. Huskies QB Phil Horvath will be out for the game, but backup Dan Nicholson is good enough that I think it won't be a huge factor.

I have TCU as the heavy favorite; I think they're the better team, and they've just been playing off their ass lately. Though obviously, for NIU to have any chance, the key is going to have to be Garrett Wolfe. TCU has the #4 run defense, though there's no real evidence about how good they are, since they haven't faced that many good rushing teams. The best back the Horned Frogs played was probably New Mexico's Rodney Ferguson, who got held to 71, and the only major rushing team they faced was Air Force, who got held to 98 total rushing yards. So there's some evidence TCU *could* shut down a back of Wolfe's caliber, but I personally wouldn't be surprised if Wolfe had a good day. Still, he could just as easily disappear, such as in the Western Michigan game. NIU has a definite shot, but I'll go with the safer pick.

My Pick: TCU
Confidence (out of 5): 2