FanHouse is counting down the ten best, ten worst, and ten weirdest moments in Big Ten football history.
Let's not kid ourselves: The Motor City Bowl seriously stretches the concept that there's no such thing as a bad bowl bid. Sure, it gives the MAC a much-needed bowl slot, since that conference seems to have the most bowl-eligible teams left stranded at home in the post-season. But for the Big Ten team involved, the extra couple weeks of practice are probably more of an enticement than the actual thrill of going to Detroit in late December.
Then again, the Big Ten's actual involvement with the Motor City Bowl is mostly theoretical. While the conference has had a deal with the bowl since 2003, only twice has the league actually supplied a representative: Northwestern in 2003, and Purdue last year.
So far as I know, it was I who coined the term "MACrifice" in reference to the tendency of Big Ten teams to schedule non-conference games against the dregs of that conference. The Motor City Bowl, in essence, is the revenge of the baby-sat. It's one thing to rough up a mid-major also-ran in early September; it's something else entirely to face a pretty good MAC team at a neutral site in December when everybody knows you're only there because you had a hopelessly mediocre season. The MAC team has nothing to lose; the Big Ten team has nothing to win.
It's kind of humiliating, though, when your conference has a bowl tie-in which it can't fill more often than it can. To be fair, for the most part, the Big Ten's avoidance of Detroit has less to do with mediocrity than it does with the conference's record of getting two teams into the BCS. The Motor City slot would have to fall to an eighth eligible team, and there aren't many years when there will be that many Big Ten teams that are eligible.
To be fair, both of the games the Big Ten has been involved with have been pretty good by the standards of lower-echelon bowl games. Northwestern barely lost to Boston College (28-24) in 2003; last year's Purdue-Central Michigan game was every bit the outbreak of basketball on Astro-Turf you might have expected. And the tie-in makes sense not just geographically (it's easier to sell Detroit in December to someone who's already spending the month in, say, Fort Wayne) but politically. The Motor City Bowl is chaired by former Michigan State coach George Perles, a man who is still well-respected within the conference.
Still, what does it say when there's a bowl bid in your conference that every team secretly hopes it won't get?
