Okay, this is weird - two bowls this afternoon, both played in baseball parks and named after the stadiums ("stadia" sounds so pretentious) they're played in. The first game is the Pinstripe Bowl played deep in the gritty, urban bowels of the Bronx, the home stadium of you-know-who (Yankees suck).
Fortunately, "that" team's not on the field today, and instead we have Clemson and Penn State. Can you imagine how exciting that matchup would have been in, like, 2016? But times change. Penn State and Clemson were ranked No. 2 and 4, respectively, in the preseason poll this year, but now the Nittany Lions are 6-6, the Tigers are 7-5, and neither team is even in the top 25. And here they are, playing an early-afternoon, pre-NYE bowl in the chilly Bronx - temperatures in the 20s with wind-chills down into the teens. Oh. how the mighty have fallen!
I'm far from a fan of either team, but I wound up picking Clemson as the three-point favorite out of a combination of southern pride and a lingering aversion to the whole Penn State/Jerry Sandusky scandal (Joe Paterno had to have known). But Clemson, as they so often do, let me down. After three quarters, the score was 6-3 and the game could easily have gone either way, but although they scored a fourth-quarter TD, Clemson also gave up two TDs and an FG to Penn State in that final quarter and lost the game, 22-10.
I've seen more than my fair share of disappointments in this stadium, and now with this game, I'm 0-2 on the day and 7-13 on the season.
But the other baseball stadium game, the Fenway Bowl, is already in the second quarter, so let's go to that friendlier park and see if we get some happier results.
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