Gator Bowl president Rick Catlett made the announcement Sunday night in a teleconference, “On behalf of the TaxSlayer.com Gator Bowl, I’d like to extend an invitation to Northwestern University to play Mississippi State University in the Jan. 1, 12 p.m. Gator Bowl.”
Once Jim Phillips, Northwestern vice president for athletics and recreation, accepted the invitation for Northwestern, MSU athletic director Scott Stricklin followed suit.
Two years ago, No. 21 MSU faced Michigan in the Gator Bowl and dominated the Wolverines 52-14. This year, in MSU’s third consecutive bowl appearance, the Dogs will face No. 21 Northwestern in its fifth consecutive bowl game.
Whereas MSU’s five-game bowl win streak ties Rutgers for the longest active bowl winning streak, Northwestern’s nine-game bowl losing streak is the longest in FBS history.
Both Northwestern head coach Pat Fitzgerald and MSU head coach Dan Mullen said they are taking the next few weeks to get young players extra practice time.
Fitzgerald said although the Wildcat senior class is the winningest senior class in the history of the program, his team is young and exciting to watch.
“We’ll take the early part of this month to really focus on our young players and almost look at it as a first spring practice for them, and then as we get closer to game week, we’ll obviously shift our focus to more game plan,” Fitzgerald said. “We will use this time to improve our program.”
For MSU, only eight current starters and 22 players total were on State’s roster when the Dogs made their last appearance in the Gator Bowl. Many of the key players on this year’s team were on the sidelines as redshirts when the Dogs defeated the Wolverines two years ago.
Mullen said he plans to implement the same schedule as two years ago and playing a team for the first time will be a challenge but a special opportunity.
“We’re going to spend the next couple of weeks with final exams coming up giving a lot of young players reps, and then we’ll hone in on gameplanning later,” Mullen said. “When the game day kicks off, that’s when everything changes. For our guys, they know they will have their hands full playing a team that’s gone to a lot of bowl games the last couple of years and that’s nationally ranked in every poll right now.”
Mullen and Fitzgerald are not strangers to each other. In fact, the two coaches are actually good friends. While Mullen was a quarterback’s coach at Bowling Green, his team played Northwestern, where Fitzgerald was the linebackers’ coach.
The two met at the game and continued to get to know each other when they recruited in the Houston, Texas, area at the same time when Mullen was at the University of Utah.
Fitzgerald said head coaches do not have many friends in the world, but he and Mullen have stayed in contact ever since they recruited in the same area.
“I’ve got a lot of respect for the person Dan is. He’s a great family man. You learn a lot about guys on the road and their character and who they are, and Dan is the best in the country,” Fitzgerald said. “It’s one of those situations where it’s going to be fun. You always love to compete, and when you get to compete against a friend it makes it that much more special.”
Although Fitzgerald is two years younger than Mullen, the Northwestern coach has been a head coach a few more years than the Bulldog head coach. Because of this, Mullen said he asked Fitzgerald about all the different issues that head coaches deal with on a day-to-day basis.
“I’ve called him on a lot of different occasions just about different questions and how to handle different situations and how you set up your schedule,” Mullen said. “Pat is someone who’s always been gracious enough to help me out and would help us when we had questions or when he had ideas.”
But on Jan. 1, the coaches will become fierce competitors, as only one coach will take home the Gator Bowl trophy.
MSU fans can purchase Gator Bowl tickets at Hailstate.com.