NCAA Football florida atlantic Owls

Florida Atlantic football fans took to burning a giant red letter N this week at a bonfire rally ahead of their matchup with powerful Nebraska. Its notable both for the audacity and the surprising sanction granted the exercise. In a politically correct society like ours this is a downright hostile act, made more provocative by the ceremonial lighting by both the school's president and Captain Kangaroo stand-in, coach Howard Schnellenberger.

I'll step aside and channel my inner Beavis for a moment. Fire! Heh ... heh ... Fire! Fire! Video after the jump.

You have to hand it to Howard Schnellenberger -- he may be really, really old but he also is really, really good at winning bowl games. We're talking historic good. In defeating Central Michigan to capture the bailout-free Motor City Bowl, the wannabe Captain Kangaroo pushed his bowl record to 6-0.

No, it didn't come with a national championship as happened with Miami in the 1983 Orange Bowl, a 31-30 classic over Nebraska. However, it did come with the sweet feeling of restoration as this moustachioed legend guided awkward sounding football novice Florida Atlantic to its second bowl victory in four years of D-I play. For reference, Notre Dame's second most recent bowl victory prior to this week's triumph over Hawaii was in January 1993.

Last night's victory came about with a little good luck and some questionable decisions by CMU.

Turkey Legs to Go is FanHouse's complete travel guide for all of the 2008-2009 college bowl games. Here, we cover the Motor City Bowl (Detroit, Michigan), which pits Florida Atlantic against Central Michigan.

Overview / Matchup: The idea of "Florida Atlantic versus Central Michigan" isn't sexy. It's just not. But you should be more enthralled for this tilt than you actually think. Dan LeFevour (who I feel like has been a Chippewa for nine years now) averaged over 300 passing yards per game and Rusty Smith is no slouch either. In other words, if you like an obscene amount of points being scored by two teams that you've never really heard of, Detroit is a pretty good place to be on the day after Christmas.

Oh yeah, there's an additional bonus too: it'll be the best football you'll see in Detroit all year! Zing!

Hotels: For luxury accommodation and top-notch service, the MGM Grand Detroit is the best hotel in town. The Omni Detroit River Place is in a historic landmark building and offers river views. The Leland is your bargain bet and one of the only city center hotels with rooms under 100 a night. All of our suggested hotels are within one or two miles of the stadium.

Restaurants: Rattlesnake Club is the best restaurant in Detroit and single-handedly put the motor-city on the culinary map... try the pan-roasted sterling salmon. Open for more than 60 years, Carl's Chop House is the king of Detroit steakhouses. Jacoby's since 1904 offers quality German food at reasonable prices... they also have 12 beers on tap and more than 70 bottled beers from around the world.

The price will keep going up for guarantee games as the Sun Belt Conference starts pulling teams off the market.

Florida Atlantic received $900,000 to open the season at Texas, its biggest payday ever.

Florida International turned down an offer of $1.2 million to play at an SEC team next year.

And Sun Belt Commissioner Wright Waters told the conference's athletic directors not to even consider an offer to play a road game against a BCS conference team for less than $1 million.

"A million is cheap to those guys," Waters said. "They ought to be paying us $2 million."

Increasingly, the only way to get a couple home games with a 1-A patsy at an affordable price is to either cut a full conference deal like the Big Ten did with the MAC or teams are going to have to swallow hard and accept a 2-for-1 deal.

In an ideal world, this would encourage more teams to actually schedule more games against better teams and do home-and-homes. Sadly, the reality will be even more 1-AA opponents put on the schedule since they are cheaper.

Well at least UNC-Charlotte will join the patsy ranks. Perhaps sometime in 2013.