Bahamas Bowl 2016, EMU vs. Old Dominion: Monarchs make school history

Every college football media outlet has somebody who does bowl projections, or weekly-ish guesses on which teams will end up playing in which bowls. At SB Nation, it’s me, for no other reason than I started doing it years ago and wasn’t smart enough to stop. I’m occasionally OK at it.

Going back to my preseason guesses, let’s review what went the most sideways. I didn’t list specific records for each team (though I did pick each game beforehand as a starting point), so this is more about which teams ended up the most tiers’ worth of bowls away from where some idiot had put them.

On Wednesday, I wrote that no one in the midmajor universe punches its weight as well as Western Kentucky. You could say the same thing about Skip Holtz.

In his last six years of leading a Conference USA school, Holtz has won nine games five times. He did it at East Carolina in 2008 and 2009, left for USF, then landed back in C-USA, at Louisiana Tech, in 2013. After a first-year reset, he’s gone 9-5, 9-4, and 9-5.

Just like the first warm bite into the leg of a three-piece combo, or the smell of a warm biscuit just waiting to be torn into, the Popeyes Bahamas Bowl just feels right.

Old Dominion and Eastern Michigan headed down to the Caribbean and played what was actually a pretty good game. The Monarchs won, 24-20, and according to Mack Brown on the ESPN telecast, ODU is the 19th team in FBS to win 10 games this season.

Normally kickoffs are kicked off of a tee, and that’s no secret. But when mother nature won’t cooperate, a teammate is allowed to hold for the kicker so we can get on with the game. That happened in the Bahamas Bowl. Eventually.

I absolutely empathize with running back Nick Ferrari-Smith here. If you’ve played around in the backyard with friends, you know the one person in the group who thinks they can kick a field goal. I mean, how hard could it be right?

What’s better than watching college football in the Bahamas? Well, that’s what you’ll get with the Bahamas Bowl, which has been played at Thomas Robinson Stadium in Nassau since 2014. The two teams lucky enough to travel there this year are Old Dominion and Eastern Michigan.

Old Dominion has been around for just three seasons in the FBS, but the Monarchs have improved drastically in those three years. Head coach Bobby Wilder guided his team to 6-6 and 5-7 seasons before leading them to a 9-3 record in 2016, featuring losses to NC State, Appalachian State, and Western Kentucky. The Monarchs then had five straight victories to close out the season.

The 2016-17 bowl season is upon us, meaning players are getting good, not so good, and fun gifts from their games. Sports Business Daily is kind enough to give us the scoop on everything players will be getting this year.

The majority of bowls stepped up their game from a year ago. With the games happening around the holiday season, and the fact that these players work at this sport for 365 days a year, kudos to most of these bowls for giving participants some pretty awesome gifts.