Back To The Bronx: BC-Nebraska Aligns For Memorable Bowl
December 09, 2024 | Football, #ForBoston Files
Eagles begin the journey towards the last game by facing an iconic football brand.
About 10 years ago, my then-girlfriend found herself assigned to work in Lincoln, Nebraska for a week. Ever the traveler for her job, a three-month stretch sent her to every American sector and climate stretching from Grand Junction, Colorado to South Bend, Indiana. Her week in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex in June introduced her to the concept of a summertime Texas heatwave before a northern flight to Minnesota's Twin Cities and her first time at the Mall of America.
The trip to Lincoln arrived at the tail end of that time period, but her phone call after arriving at the hotel carried a very different tone. Her group was staying, she said, across from one of the largest football stadiums she'd seen in person, and its towering bleacher section scraped into the upper reaches of the cloudless sky.
Almost immediately, I launched into the history of Nebraska football and how it ruled the national scene for the bulk of its history. I described the Big Eight and its merger with the Southwest Conference after the Texas-based schools abandoned their league for greener waters. I talked about Tom Osbourne, Tommy Frazier, and the infamous Bowl Championship Series national championship game against Miami. I described what Nebraska meant to college football and how its rivalry with Oklahoma bordered on Army-Navy to my dad's generation.
As I finished rambling and ranting about her temporary neighbor, she asked me if Boston College ever played Nebraska, to which I disappointingly had to tell her that it had never happened. BC, especially in those days, rarely left the Northeast, and Nebraska had enough college football freight in its general geography. The two never had a reason to cross paths.
On Sunday afternoon, this exact conversation came back because Boston College and Nebraska were announced as football opponents for the first time in either program's history when the 2024 Bad Boy Mowers Pinstripe Bowl paired them together for a neutral site game at fabled Yankee Stadium in the Bronx.
"I am excited for our team to be heading to New York," said head coach Bill O'Brien in a statement. "Boston College is well-represented in New York City and the tri-state area, so to have the opportunity to play in the Northeast, where so many of our fans and alumni call home, is an honor. We look forward to the challenge of competing against the storied Nebraska program."
Nebraska hasn't played in a major bowl game in nearly two decades, but the Cornhuskers' unquestioned relevance remains an intricate part of Bowl Season's intersected shifted and ever-changing tides. Back in 1997, the Bowl Alliance national champions defeated Tennessee in the Orange Bowl by three touchdowns but failed to claim more than a share of a split crown because Michigan was contractually obligated to play in the Rose Bowl as the Big Ten champion. The Rose Bowl wasn't part of the alliance's three-game national championship rotation, so the Associated Press was able to crown the Wolverines after their victory over Pac-10 champion Washington State.
One year later, the Rose Bowl joined the Bowl Championship Series and created a formal mathematical formula based agreements among the six so-called "power conferences," but the system's fourth year resulted in Nebraska advancing to the national championship game against Miami despite a blowout loss to Colorado leaving the Huskers out of the Big 12's conference championship game. Dropped to fourth in the BCS standings, Nebraska found itself elevated into the national championship game after Florida and Texas unexpectedly lost their respective conference title games, the latter of which was the Big 12 game that Nebraska missed, fallout from which created steps eventually leading to the College Football Playoff's creation.
Agreements and realignments drew BC and Nebraska closer together after the Huskers realigned into the Big Ten in 2011, but the thought of facing one another never crossed paths until Bowl Season expanded its reach beyond traditional markets. Excluding national championship-type games and major bowl games, Nebraska hasn't played in a bowl game north of Tennessee since 1962 and only once ever traveled into the eastern time zone. Orange Bowl berths kept them available for the national championship throughout the 1970s and 1980s, but its last game at the Music City Bowl offered the rare trip into ACC or SEC country for a team more closely aligned with historical games in the Southwest.
The only game played outside of the south was, ironically, at Yankee Stadium, but the 1962 Gotham Bowl against Miami only came to fruition in the last week ahead of the game's scheduled date, and little coverage existed outside of New York City, which was in a newspaper media strike at the time. In Massachusetts, The Boston Globe didn't cover it beyond a lower-half box below headlines surrounding the Boston Celtics' loss to Cincinnati, and a future page picture of Larry Donovan only grainily sat next to standings proclaiming the future championship prospects of Green Bay's 12-1 Packers.
"The week-long newspaper strike," said the Globe, "the game's financial problems and the sub-freezing weather combined to ruin the game at the gate."
December 28 is a far cry from those days, but playing BC in the Boogie-down Bronx is something altogether different for this year's Nebraska team. Even beyond the 5-1 start to the season, the Huskers are essentially entering a market well-known for its Boston College roots, an irony to the sense that Boston and New York are often at odds with each other on the sports field, particularly at Yankee Stadium.
Tens of thousands of BC alumni live in the greater tri-state area, and each of BC's previous two trips to the Pinstripe Bowl produced attendance numbers on par with the game's most popular events. The 2014 game against Penn State sold out the stadium for a crowd of 49,012, and the 2017 matchup with Iowa offered organizers a crowd commensurate and comparable to games involving either Rutgers, which is located in northern New Jersey, or Syracuse, which boasts itself as "New York's College Team."
"Our team is looking forward to the opportunity to spend the bowl season in New York City and play in the Pinstripe Bowl," said Nebraska head coach Matt Rhule. "This is a great connection between two iconic brands in Nebraska football and Yankee Stadium, and it will be a memorable experience for our players. I have great respect for the Boston College program and the success Coach O'Brien has had in his first season."
BC and Nebraska will kick off the 2024 Bad Boy Mowers Pinstripe Bowl on December 28 at 12 p.m. The game will be broadcast on national television via ABC with tickets available by visiting BCEagles.com. Season tickets for BC's 2025 season are also available from the same site.
The trip to Lincoln arrived at the tail end of that time period, but her phone call after arriving at the hotel carried a very different tone. Her group was staying, she said, across from one of the largest football stadiums she'd seen in person, and its towering bleacher section scraped into the upper reaches of the cloudless sky.
Almost immediately, I launched into the history of Nebraska football and how it ruled the national scene for the bulk of its history. I described the Big Eight and its merger with the Southwest Conference after the Texas-based schools abandoned their league for greener waters. I talked about Tom Osbourne, Tommy Frazier, and the infamous Bowl Championship Series national championship game against Miami. I described what Nebraska meant to college football and how its rivalry with Oklahoma bordered on Army-Navy to my dad's generation.
As I finished rambling and ranting about her temporary neighbor, she asked me if Boston College ever played Nebraska, to which I disappointingly had to tell her that it had never happened. BC, especially in those days, rarely left the Northeast, and Nebraska had enough college football freight in its general geography. The two never had a reason to cross paths.
On Sunday afternoon, this exact conversation came back because Boston College and Nebraska were announced as football opponents for the first time in either program's history when the 2024 Bad Boy Mowers Pinstripe Bowl paired them together for a neutral site game at fabled Yankee Stadium in the Bronx.
"I am excited for our team to be heading to New York," said head coach Bill O'Brien in a statement. "Boston College is well-represented in New York City and the tri-state area, so to have the opportunity to play in the Northeast, where so many of our fans and alumni call home, is an honor. We look forward to the challenge of competing against the storied Nebraska program."
Nebraska hasn't played in a major bowl game in nearly two decades, but the Cornhuskers' unquestioned relevance remains an intricate part of Bowl Season's intersected shifted and ever-changing tides. Back in 1997, the Bowl Alliance national champions defeated Tennessee in the Orange Bowl by three touchdowns but failed to claim more than a share of a split crown because Michigan was contractually obligated to play in the Rose Bowl as the Big Ten champion. The Rose Bowl wasn't part of the alliance's three-game national championship rotation, so the Associated Press was able to crown the Wolverines after their victory over Pac-10 champion Washington State.
One year later, the Rose Bowl joined the Bowl Championship Series and created a formal mathematical formula based agreements among the six so-called "power conferences," but the system's fourth year resulted in Nebraska advancing to the national championship game against Miami despite a blowout loss to Colorado leaving the Huskers out of the Big 12's conference championship game. Dropped to fourth in the BCS standings, Nebraska found itself elevated into the national championship game after Florida and Texas unexpectedly lost their respective conference title games, the latter of which was the Big 12 game that Nebraska missed, fallout from which created steps eventually leading to the College Football Playoff's creation.
Agreements and realignments drew BC and Nebraska closer together after the Huskers realigned into the Big Ten in 2011, but the thought of facing one another never crossed paths until Bowl Season expanded its reach beyond traditional markets. Excluding national championship-type games and major bowl games, Nebraska hasn't played in a bowl game north of Tennessee since 1962 and only once ever traveled into the eastern time zone. Orange Bowl berths kept them available for the national championship throughout the 1970s and 1980s, but its last game at the Music City Bowl offered the rare trip into ACC or SEC country for a team more closely aligned with historical games in the Southwest.
The only game played outside of the south was, ironically, at Yankee Stadium, but the 1962 Gotham Bowl against Miami only came to fruition in the last week ahead of the game's scheduled date, and little coverage existed outside of New York City, which was in a newspaper media strike at the time. In Massachusetts, The Boston Globe didn't cover it beyond a lower-half box below headlines surrounding the Boston Celtics' loss to Cincinnati, and a future page picture of Larry Donovan only grainily sat next to standings proclaiming the future championship prospects of Green Bay's 12-1 Packers.
"The week-long newspaper strike," said the Globe, "the game's financial problems and the sub-freezing weather combined to ruin the game at the gate."
December 28 is a far cry from those days, but playing BC in the Boogie-down Bronx is something altogether different for this year's Nebraska team. Even beyond the 5-1 start to the season, the Huskers are essentially entering a market well-known for its Boston College roots, an irony to the sense that Boston and New York are often at odds with each other on the sports field, particularly at Yankee Stadium.
Tens of thousands of BC alumni live in the greater tri-state area, and each of BC's previous two trips to the Pinstripe Bowl produced attendance numbers on par with the game's most popular events. The 2014 game against Penn State sold out the stadium for a crowd of 49,012, and the 2017 matchup with Iowa offered organizers a crowd commensurate and comparable to games involving either Rutgers, which is located in northern New Jersey, or Syracuse, which boasts itself as "New York's College Team."
"Our team is looking forward to the opportunity to spend the bowl season in New York City and play in the Pinstripe Bowl," said Nebraska head coach Matt Rhule. "This is a great connection between two iconic brands in Nebraska football and Yankee Stadium, and it will be a memorable experience for our players. I have great respect for the Boston College program and the success Coach O'Brien has had in his first season."
BC and Nebraska will kick off the 2024 Bad Boy Mowers Pinstripe Bowl on December 28 at 12 p.m. The game will be broadcast on national television via ABC with tickets available by visiting BCEagles.com. Season tickets for BC's 2025 season are also available from the same site.
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