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Motivation is always a key in handicapping bowl games, and that force will be pretty equal in tonight’s Texas bowl matchup between Minnesota and Syracuse. The Gophers dropped their final two games and are looking for their first nine win season since 2003. In addition, the Gophers arrive in Houston failing to score an offensive touchdown in their last 10 quarters of play. Meanwhile, the Orange was fortunate to even go bowling with a season finale victory over Boston College. However, at 6-6, Syracuse will look to make it back-to-back winning seasons for the first time since 2001 when the program was just tailing off as a force in the college football world.
The Gophers have a long history of being left for dead once the season hits the halfway point but instead they rattled off four straight Big Ten wins (Northwestern, Penn State, Indiana and Nebraska). They failed to live up to heightened expectations losing their final two games to Wisconsin and Michigan State. However, both of those teams will be playing January 1st, and Minny did cover the pointspread in both instances. In fact, the Gophers will hit the field in Houston having ripped off six straight spread covers. The question entering tonight is can the offense produce with much weight on sophomore signal caller Philip Nelson. The Gophers have the 116th ranked passing unit with Nelson completing just over 50% of his passes. These teams mirror each other in many ways and the quarterback position is certainly one of them. The Orange struggled to move the football through the air as well with sophomore Terrel Hunt. Against top tier defensive units one would wonder how the Orange would ever score. Their offense ranked 98th in scoring to go with the 103rd passing offense.
These two teams did meet last year in September as the Gophers took care of business on their home turf 17-10. Calling this time around a revenge situation would be a stretch as both teams will be well prepared. Overall, this once again sets up to be a low scoring game with both teams preferring to keep the game on the ground. I expect a close, hard fought, low scoring contest.
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