At Orange Bowl kickoff, it’ll be nearly 70 degrees hotter in Miami than in Madison, Wisconsin

I won’t even bother captioning these. I’ll let you take a wild guess at which one is Madison, Wisconsin and which one is Miami. These are the temperatures of both places at kickoff time of the Orange Bowl.

Saturday’s high in Miami is 77 degrees. Madison’s high is 2.

I had a rude awakening when, as a Florida native, I wore shorts on Christmas at my parents’ house. I got off the plane back here in New York and was impressed that atmospheric conditions could coalesce to create the bone-chilling temperatures that are freezing the East Coast and Midwest this weekend.

Wisconsin fans had the opposite phenomenon this week when they journeyed to Miami for the game. They traded in their cheese curds and beer up north for some Cuban sandwiches and probably more beer down south.

Those are Wisconsin fans in short sleeves in December. Just a dream for these folks, I’d imagine.

Their expat Badger friends in South Florida are excited to have some friendlies in the area this week.

An estimated 2,200 UW-Madison alumni live full-time in the Miami and Fort Lauderdale area. It may not be Camp Randall on a Saturday morning, but organizers are hoping to see enough Badgers red in the stands to offset any home field advantage by the opposing team.

“We’re so excited about seeing Wisconsin people,” said Jeri Jandovitz, a 1976 UW-Madison graduate and Miami resident for the past 34 years. “It’s a different breed of people.”

The team even went deep sea fishing for their bowl activity.

While Wisconsin was selected to the Orange Bowl by the Playoff committee as an at-large, the Big Ten has bowl ties on the books to the Quick Lane Bowl in Detroit and the Pinstripe Bowl in New York as potential cold-weather destinations.

Besides that, it’s strictly fun-in-the sun locales like San Diego, Tampa or Pasadena. The Big Ten bowl slate features these destinations as a welcome departure from old man winter. The Big Ten’s also the only Power 5 league that doesn’t have at least a few teams in the southern part of the United States, and the league doesn’t even play night games in November because the weather’s so cold.

You’ll be back up here freezing with the rest of us in due time.