Georgia Tech And Minnesota Face Off In The Quick Lane Bowl

Very strange matchup on the Wednesday, December 26 college football bowl game schedule as ACC entrant Georgia Tech takes on Big Ten entrant Minnesota. The teams involved aren’t the strange part of the matchup—the venue is. For all of their hard work during the 2018 season these teams get a much deserved reward—a trip to Detroit in December. The Quick Lane Bowl is named after the oil change and maintenance company and is being played at Ford Field, home of the Detroit Lions.

The primary storyline in this game is the retirement of Georgia Tech head coach Paul Johnson. Johnson is the option offense mastermind who has built winning program everywhere he’s landed. In his first job as a head coach he built Georgia Southern into a 1-AA/FCS powerhouse with five Southern Conference championships and two national championships. He then moved on to revive the moribund program at Navy. In 2008, he became head coach at Georgia Tech and has been there ever since. A great coach and one of the real class acts in college sports, Johnson likely deserves better than to end his coaching career in a meaningless bowl game held in the most miserable venue imaginable.

It’s always tough to evaluate mid level teams from tough conferences. Just because a team is an also ran in the SEC doesn’t mean that they can’t leave the conference and be a very competitive football team. To a slightly lesser degree, this is also true with the Big 10. It’s easy to dismiss Minnesota based on their record alone (6-6 overall, 3-6 Big 10) buy they faced a tough level of opposition week in and week out. Another factor that makes Minnesota tough to evaluate—they made some changes late in the season that appear to have strengthened them. After a horrible loss to Illinois, head coach PJ Fleck fired the Gophers’ defensive coordinator. They’ve also solidified the quarterback position by putting Tanner Morgan in as the starter. The ‘eye test’ suggests that this is a team heading in the right direction but statistically the sample size is just too small to validate this.

The college football pointspread on this game has Georgia Tech installed as a -5.5 favorite and that’s tough to justify on a neutral field. This looks like a very evenly matched games and there’s little to suggest that either side has a significant statistical advantage over the other in any relevant phase of the game. So why has Tech been installed as almost a touchdown favorite? The ‘Paul Johnson retirement’ storyline likely has something to do with it as the conventional wisdom suggests that his team will want to ‘send him out a winner’ in his final game. That’s a nice narrative, but more ‘wishful thinking’ than something that should be priced into the line.

A secondary factor is likely the difficulty teams have preparing to defend Georgia Tech’s triple option offense. It can be a very tough matchup to be sure but it’s not like the Golden Gophers didn’t have a month to prepare for Tech’s unique offensive set. More significantly, it’s not clear if Georgia Tech has the personnel it needs to really dominate tactically. The triple option works the best when it has an experienced and talented player at quarterback and running back. Tech has a pair of talented quarterbacks in TaQuon Marshall and Tobias Oliver (rushed for 896 and 807 yards respectively) but the running back position has been in a state of flux since KirVonte Benson went down with a season ending knee injury.

It’s hard to see how Georgia Tech gets excited about playing a bowl game in Detroit and it’ll be a severe letdown to the atmosphere they experienced in their previous game—facing the University of Georgia at Sanford Stadium in Athens. Heading North to a cold weather climate in a grimy city like Detroit isn’t exactly a young football player’s dream growing up. In our view, Georgia Tech is way overpriced here likely due to the perceived situational and tactical advantage. It doesn’t appear to be statistically based. Minnesota spoils Paul Johnson’s swansong and wins this game outright.

BET MINNESOTA +5.5 OVER GEORGIA TECH