Birmingham Bowl: Georgia Southern 29, Appalachian State 10

Only one game today, and it had two Sun Belt teams. The Birmingham Bowl typically has a team from the SEC playing against an AAC team, but if either conference doesn't have a qualifying team available, they pick a team from CUSA or the MAC, or choose an at-large team. This year, with so many teams opting out of bowls, they had to scrounge and wound up with two Sun Belt teams (the Georgia Southern Eagles and the Appalachian State Mountaineers) who've already played each other this season; the Eagles won that game, 25-23. 

Georgia Southern went 6-6 this season and Appalachian State, 5-7, and neither team was ranked. I picked Georgia Southern as a 2½-point favorite because they're from Georgia, because they've already beaten App State once, and because of what the Mountaineers did back in 2017. 

On September 2 of that fateful year, Appalachian State opened the season with a game against Georgia in Athens. In the first quarter of that game, defensive tackle Myquon Stout hit Georgia QB Jacob Eason with a cheap, out-of-bounds shot at the end of a play and Georgia had to replace the injured Eason with a freshman QB, Jake Fromm. However, the joke was on the Mountaineers, because Fromm played so well that not only did the Dawgs win the game, 31-10, but Fromm went on to become Georgia's starting QB for the next three seasons. Jacob Eason, realizing that with Fromm as the starter there was nothing left for him to do at Georgia, transferred to Washington to get some playing time. What’s more, Justin Fields, Georgia’s backup QB, transferred to Ohio State to get his playing time. Those transfers would not have happened if not for Appalachian State's cheap shot. 

In his first year as Georgia's starting QB, Fromm led the Dawgs to the 2017 National Championship Game. The Bulldogs took a 13-0 halftime lead over Alabama in the game, forcing coach Nick Saban to replace his starting QB, Jalen Hurts, with then-unknown freshman Tua Tagovailoa. The Tide won the game in OT with a field goal, and Tua wound up becoming the new starting QB at Alabama, and with Tua starting at ‘Bama, Jalen Hurts had to transfer to Oklahoma. The chain of events that started with the Mountaineer's cheap shot on Eason led to all those transfers and changed the course of college football history and I'll never forgive them for that. 

So yeah, I'm not picking the Mountaineers, especially not over a Georgia team they've already lost to once this season. Which turned out to be a smart decision. The Mountaineers threw four interceptions and missed a field goal, and Georgia Southern won easily, 29-10. I'm still only 10-16 on my picks so far this season, though.

The ESPN announcers made a big deal over the fact that this game was the first time in CFB history that a team beat a conference rival twice in the same season - there have been rematches in the same season before, and one team won both games in some of those rematches but, they claimed, those two-win rematches never were between two teams from the same conference. That's ominous, because Georgia beat Ole Miss, 43-35, this season and will be playing them again in the CFP quarterfinal on January 1. Is it possible that a team never went 2-0 against a conference opponent until this year, and then it happens twice in one season?