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\u2019t the strange part of the matchup\u2014the venue is. For all of their hard work during the 2018 season these teams get a much deserved reward\u2014a 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. <\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s always tough to evaluate mid level teams from tough conferences. Just because a team is an also ran in the SEC doesn\u2019t mean that they can\u2019t leave the conference and be a very competitive football team. To a slightly lesser degree, this is also true with the Big 10. It\u2019s 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\u2014they 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\u2019 defensive coordinator. They\u2019ve also solidified the quarterback position by putting Tanner Morgan in as the starter. The \u2018eye test\u2019 suggests that this is a team heading in the right direction but statistically the sample size is just too small to validate this.<\/p>\n