Mississippi State vs. Rice, 2013 Liberty Bowl: CLANGA CLANGA CLANGA CLANGA

Manziel in the final three quarters: 19-for-21 for 285 yards, eight carries for 60 yards, five total touchdowns. Duke continued to move the ball offensively, but Manziel almost single-handedly kept A&M afloat in the first half, and the (justifiably) maligned Aggie defense finally began to make some stops in the second.

Average scoring margin for the day’s first three bowls. Hell, we really hadn’t had a good day of bowling since Friday. But then the Chick-fil-A Bowl came around.

Mississippi State took control in the second quarter and never looked back in their Liberty Bowl victory over Rice on Tuesday. The game was tied, 7-7, after the first 15 minutes, but the Bulldogs outscored the Owls 37-0 the rest of the way for a 44-7 win.

Prescott did more damage in the third quarter, scoring on runs of 5 and 11 yards. Taylor Earhart connected on a 20-yard field goal with 4:45 left in the game to complete the scoring.

Here’s an explanation of the duck-marching tradition at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis. Here is ESPN’s Bob Wischusen (and that might be Quint Kessenich in the background, too), in town for the Rice-Mississippi State Liberty Bowl, participating in said tradition:

THEY RIDE THE DAMN ELEVATOR. SB Nation officially approves of this tradition and would like to be duck masters sometime, please.

One of the biggest annual tests of conference power is the Liberty Bowl, which sees the champion of Conference-USA face off against one of the middle teams in the SEC. This season, it’s a 10-win Rice team squaring off against a .500 Mississippi State squad.

You’d be hard-pressed to find six better losses than the ones Mississippi State can claim. Oklahoma State, Auburn, LSU, South Carolina, Texas A&M and Alabama are all playing in major bowl games, and while the Bulldogs were unable to pull off any big upsets, their losses are certainly understandable. Mississippi State’s best wins came over MAC champions Bowling Green and in-state rival Ole Miss, and the Bullies will look to add to that list with the Owls.

How much is a late-season push worth? It varies by the team, obviously. This time last year, Rice rode a five-game winning streak into bowl season, then just kept right on rolling, thumping Air Force by 19 points.

(The Owls are actually still rolling. They’ve won 16 of 20 after winning nine of their previous 30.)

Mississippi State is one of those teams that are definitely better than their record. The Bulldogs went 0-6 in games in which they were an underdog of six points or more, facing a murderer’s row of Oklahoma State, Auburn, LSU, South Carolina, Texas A&M and Alabama.

Mississippi State (SEC, 6-6 SU, 7-5 ATS, 4-8 OU) went 6-0 over the rest of its schedule including two strong wins to end the season on the road against Arkansas and at home against Ole Miss. The Bulldogs were 4-0 against the spread over their last four games.

This is wonderful, but one problem: If Rice DOES call that “rugby” play, initiating a wild lateral melee at the end of a game, and a lineman DOES score a touchdown, how will everyone know which celebration to use? Or will they just feel it?

Either way, we’ll have to watch some Rice football this year, just in case.

In mid-November, it looked nearly impossible that Oklahoma could find their way to a BCS bowl. Sure, they had wins over ranked Notre Dame and Texas Tech teams, but neither was looking quite as good as the numbers to the left of their names might have suggested. The only real challenges the Sooners faced were against Texas and Baylor -- both resulted in blowout losses.

But Oklahoma recovered, easily defeating Iowa State and Kansas State before pulling out a dramatic upset win in Stillwater to rob rival Oklahoma State of the conference crown while simultaneously taking away their BCS berth.

Sometimes, the college football bowl system seems meaningless. Thirty-five games, in increasingly uninteresting cities in increasingly empty stadiums with increasingly ridiculous sounding corporate sponsors, featuring virtually every team that managed to pull off the incredibly easy task of winning six football games.

To summarize: who could possibly care about the Autozone Liberty Bowl, a game in Memphis which should be the fourth-most interesting game to be played on Dec. 31?

How deep is the SEC? The Liberty Bowl is one way to find out. It’s supposed to pit the eighth-best team from what’s considered the country’s strongest conference against the top team from Conference-USA. The SEC has generally won these games (when they’ve had enough teams qualify to send eight), but could this year be different?

Date and time, ET: Dec. 31 at 4 p.m. ET

The first score of the game came on a halfback pass from Rice running back Luke Turner to Donte Moore. Turner also had a passing touchdown during his freshman season in 2012. Rice was up 14-0 on Marshall after the first quarter, and its lead was never much in doubt en route to a 41-24 victory. The Owls took the Conference USA Championship and with it, a berth in the Liberty Bowl.

Turner threw another touchdown in the third quarter. A running back throwing two touchdowns in a game may or may not have happened about every week in the 1940s.