Bowl Game Momentum: Fact or Fiction?

There were a lot of great nuggets of information in that recent interview Adam Rittenberg of ESPN.com conducted with Pat Fitzgerald. The focus as Northwestern heads into the bowl game is on winning the bowl game. There is no stuffed monkey or gimmicks to represent some hill to overcome. Fitzgerald is treating this as a business trip with some business to take care of. Everything else is left to the fans to debate on.

There is one thing though… momentum.

Yes, it is the next day’s pitcher, so to speak. Then again, it might be something more. It is one less thing Northwestern has to deal with as a program trying to gain legitimacy — or to change perception and help the program grow in the ways that fans like us care. Winning, of course, is the ultimate cure for whatever problems the fan base feels the program has or needs to correct.

Fitzgerald brushed aside the question saying that he does not think a bowl win carries over into the offseason. Of course, as Adam Rittenberg pointed out when he talked to LTP, Fitz has never experienced a Northwestern bowl win. Many of us haven’t. To us, it would seem, winning a bowl game could have great importance. An importance that we may not quite understand yet.

It is hard to say what kind of impact a bowl win for Northwestern would have. In fact, it is nearly impossible. Northwestern has just never won a bowl game and so the program cannot say what it would do for the program as a whole — the general feelings around it, the spirit in offseason workouts, ticket sales, recruiting, everything. NU has gained some benefits even in close losses — recruits were still talking about the 70-plus pass attempts from the Outback Bowl even the year after!

Bowl performance and results do leave a taste in everyone’s mouth for the offseason. That has to count for something, right?

So since Northwestern has never experienced a bowl win — at least not in this modern age of over saturation of bowl games — what does a bowl win actually get you? Does it build momentum or is that a media-created myth?

Take a look at last year’s bowl winners and their record this year — yes, all 30-some odd of them.

So of the bowl winners last year, only nine failed to make a bowl game this year. And, further, and more telling, 24 bowl winners had a worse record this year than they did last. It seems that bowl momentum is more myth than fact.

There are of course plenty of other reasons for this — coaching changes like the one that happened at Houston and Illinois, seniors graduating like what happened with Southern Miss or a new conference like what happened with Missouri, West Virginia and TCU. One team’s success the previous year really has little effect on the next season.

So how about the BCS top 25? What were there bowl results?

Looking at the top-25, it seems clear making a bowl game is pretty important just to stay in the discussion for the top-25. That seems to be the most important thing to take away. Northwestern has accomplished that feat already.

But the other thing to notice is that only five of the top-10 teams in this year’s BCS standings won their bowl game last year. It seems Fitz is right, bowl wins mean nothing during the course of the season. Each team is different.

Of course, there is one place bowl wins do matter. And the one place it matters is probably the place where the coaching staff and the team cares the least.

The preseason top-25. Take a look at the preseason AP top 25:

In the AP Top 25, 14 of the 25 teams won their bowl games, including seven of the top 10. It seems, bowl wins do not matter much for poll placement. Maybe it enables a team to sneak in on the back end, maybe not.

These are all superficial things anyway. Things that fans care about and that those within the program probably have little thought about.

At least this season shows us that the momentum of winning a bowl game seems largely a media creation. That does not mean winning the bowl game is not important. Just maybe not for the forward-looking reasons we want to think it is.