FanHouse AlamoBowl

FanHouse gathers around the TV to bring you insights from Bowl Season '08.

Missouri quarterback Chase Daniel has had a wonderful career, but tonight was not his night telling a sideline reporter "my teammates had to win this game in spite of me". Harsh but spot on, as heavily favored Missouri weathered Daniel's three interceptions in gutting out an overtime victory against Northwestern, 30 to 23.

Daniel's line was brutal, completing 27 of 44 passes for just 200 yards and a pair of touchdowns against three interceptions. His accuracy was off all evening, perhaps due to a tremendous defensive effort by Northwestern that held Missouri to just 311 yards, perhaps due to shocking last game jitters. Daniel did gather himself late, completing 5 of 8 passes for 42 yards including the game-winning overtime touchdown pass to teammate Jeremy Maclin.

Northwestern badly outplayed Missouri throughout the game, but was damned by a missed extra point and Maclin's electrifying punt return touchdown just before halftime that evened the game at 10-all.

Turkey Legs to Go is FanHouse's complete travel guide for all of the 2008-2009 college bowl games. Here, we cover the Alamo Bowl (San Antonio, Texas), which pits Northwestern against Missouri.

Overview / Matchup: The Alamo is another example (like the PJ Bowl) of a lower end second tier bowl that lucked out with a pretty beasty matchup; Northwestern and Missouri both finished in the top 25 for the season. And while Northwestern might be a touch overmatched on offense (Chase Daniel is straight sick, son), Mizzou isn't known for stopping anyone. So, at the very least, you can expect a pretty explosive shootout. Which works well given the historical nature of the San Antonio venue.

Hotels: The Marriott Rivercenter is probably the finest hotel in San Antonio and is definitely the most recognizable. The hotel's imposing step-back design and 38-story towers dominate the San Antonio skyline. The Sheraton Gunter Hotel is slightly pricier than our usual midrange suggestion; nevertheless it's the best overall balancing luxury, with cost and stadium proximity. The Red Roof Inn Downtown offers meager accommodations, but more than makes up for it with rooms less than US$100 a night and a location just blocks from the stadium and Riverwalk.

Ready for bowl season? Join FanHouse as we preview each of the 34 bowls with a lot of analysis, a little irreverence, and, we promise, at least one joke about Karl Malden's nose. Your parents, or Joe Paterno, will explain it to you.

Below are the Week 1 bowl games. Click here for Week 2 and the non-BCS bowls of Week 3. Or click here for BCS bowls analysis.

As the radio and TV keep telling us, it's the most wonderful time of the year. For college football fans, this is most certainly true. We're only 10 days away from the start of the bowl season, and already, the BCS national championship has been analyzed to death. (Hey, did you realize Oklahoma scores a lot of points? Wow, Florida has a good quarterback. I think his name is Tom Turbo or something.)

Some games get substantially less attention than the big time, big money blockbusters, however, and there's a good reason for that. They're only meaningful to the teams involved and their fans. But that doesn't mean that we fans should pay them no attention. It just means we don't need to pay them much attention.

So we at FanHouse have decided to give you a brief summary of these lesser games. I know that calling the Motor City Bowl "lesser" might be controversial, at least to people from Detroit, or people from the planet Gazorpnitz. For the rest of us, we'll keep it short. We start with the games played before Dec. 30, and if you don't see a game previewed here, it'll get more attention from one of us later. Now, onward!