Last Saturday it was announced that the currently coach-less Fighting Illini Football team will face UCLA in the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl in San Francisco.
Never heard of it? Yeah, me neither.
Unfortunately the too-good-to-be-true 6-0 record that our team started the season with really was too good to be true, because as it is still painfully etched in our memories, we lost our last 6 games in a row.
With a 6-6 record there was a possibility that the boys in orange and blue might not even make it to a bowl game, so I guess we should be grateful?
But what exactly do we know about our upcoming bowl game? Well, if you can’t already tell by the title, the game is sponsored by Kraft and is dedicated to raising money and awareness of hunger issues in the United States. It’s only been around since 2002 and in that short time it has had 2 previous titles, The Diamond Walnut San Francisco Bowl and the Emerald Bowl. We know that we are playing the UCLA Bruins, a team who also recently fired their head coach and happens to have an even worse record then our team ending their regular season at 6-7. We know that U of I can’t afford to send the entire Marching Illini to the game, with current plans only allotting for 49 of the 350 band members to attend. We know that according to a recent rivals.com article that the Fight Hunger Bowl will be the most depressing game to watch this season, and that NBC Sports said that this Hunger bowl was “Starving for legitimacy”. But hey, it’s still a bowl game, right?
The Fighting Illini team has play in 8 bowl games in my lifetime and only 2 of those have been Bowl Championship Series games. Both of those games, the 2001 Sugar Bowl in New Orleans and the 2007 Rose Bowl in Pasadena ended in embarrassing losses. I actually went to the Sugar Bowl with my family when I was 11. We played LSU in Louisiana and were mocked both before the game and after our defeat for sporting orange, but it was still a great experience. All around the French Quarter there were flags supporting the teams (mostly LSU) hanging from the balconies and I got a pretty sweet set of U of I Mardi Gras beads.
We haven’t always faired poorly in BCS championship games. Out of our 5 appearances in the Rose Bowl we’ve gone 3-2. The first Rose Bowl game we played in 1946 was actually against future opponents UCLA, we won 45-14, but the next bowl game we met them in, another Rose Bowl, we got our Illini butts handed to us with an end score of 45-9. We’ve played against UCLA 3 times in our bowl history, more than any other opponent, meeting them again in the 1991 Hancock Bowl – another loss.
Our most recent bowl game appearance, last year’s Texas Bowl against Baylor resulted in our first bowl win in over 10 years. Now, with a 7-9 bowl game record, a win against UCLA would get us one step closer to an even record.
So though we have had a disappointing season, we are currently without a coach and we are playing in one of the most obscure bowl games, at least we will be playing after Christmas and in sunny California. We could be freezing in the Little Caesars Pizza Bowl (formally the Motor City Bowl) in Detroit, Michigan like fellow Big Ten Conference team Purdue – Sorry Boilermakers!