The 6 silliest things about the 1st Bad Boy Mowers Gasparilla Bowl

Temple beat FIU 28-3 in the Bad Boy Mowers Gasparilla Bowl. You’re not here for the score, most likely. You’re really here to see the weirdness we’re going to lean into full bore surrounding this game. This is the game that had the teams race lawn mowers during game week, after all.

When people say there are too many bowl games, I will posit this as perhaps our fiercest argument to the contrary. Bowl games are fun and good. They offer weird color and pageantry in the postseason slate.

I’m thankful for many things this holiday season. One of them is the weird bowl on the crappy turf with orange mowers on the sideline.

Death. Taxes. Tropicana Field looking very strange on camera:

The way they’ve covered up the baseball dirt is the weird thing this year, but it’s much better than the turf in recent years. The turf at Tropicana Field was so bad that the Rays got it changed, and it necessitated an actual news story:

“Unsurprisingly, turf technology has evolved in the last five years,” team president Brian Auld said, “and we think the new turf will be better for our players’ bodies and play a little truer, and aesthetically will be an improvement on TV and in person.”

The turf will be “a touch darker,” Auld said, which the Rays hope will prevent it from looking washed out, especially on TV. It also features shallower fill, which should keep the blades standing up and create less “splash” when a ball hits.

It was bad:

There’s some irony here in the fact that a mowing company sponsors a game played on the worst artificial grass in Major League Baseball.

Adonis Jennings turns up the difficulty level and basically catches the ball on his back:

Temple’s Freddie Booth-Lloyd has what is perhaps my new favorite fumble recovery. All things equal, it’s much more impressive than Jennings’ catch:

Oh gracious, the commercials. Bad Boy Mowers really wanted to drive home its badass persona. And it did so with an array of, uhh, interesting advertisements:

Bad Boy Mowers apparently leads the zero-turn mower world. Who are you, simple reader, to say anything to the contrary?

Yes, the actual mowers were on display as well.

We were told they’d be, well, everywhere:

“At the stadium itself, there are going to be mowers everywhere, all over the place,” Dulaney said. “People handing out information, promotional teams, we’ll have mowers out on the field — we’ll have a mower bring out the stage for the trophy presentation. So we’ll have lawnmowers up on the concourses, out on the field, they’ll be in television view, we’ll have them on our shipwreck party deck, but we’ll also have them at all of our other events.”

The folks at Bad Boy Mowers did not disappoint:

Even ESPN sideline commentator Roddy Jones got in on the action:

It’s unclear if any of the players were able to ride any of the mowers out of the stadium. One can only hope and dream.