FanHouse IndependenceBowl

The Independence Bowl has always resided in that lower tier of bowls. Unlike other bowls at that level, though, the Shreveport, Louisiana-based bowl has struggled with keeping its corporate sponsorship.

It has not had the stability of hotel chains (Gaylord Liberty and Sheraton Hawaii), electronics (Pioneer Las Vegas), auto financing (GMAC Bowl) or even pizza (Papa John's Bowl). It has had three different corporate sponsors just in this decade.

Turkey Legs to Go is FanHouse's complete travel guide for all of the 2008-2009 college bowl games. Here, we cover the Independence Bowl (Shreveport, Louisiana), which pits Louisiana Tech against Northern Illinois.

Overview/Matchup: If the city of Shreveport was hoping for a tourism boost this bowl season, well ... they're not going to get it. Unless Northern Illinois can drag 40,000 or so fans to this game. Which they can't. The Huskies closed out the season with a 16-0 skunking at the hands of Navy, giving them a sweet 6-6 and barely eligible bowl record. Only poor showings by the East Division of the MAC allowed them to sneak into a bowl and they were rewarded with a WAC matchup against the Bulldogs thanks to Boise St.'s perfect record. Yes, it is a scorcher.

Hotels: Shreveport is an odd town. Since it's located on the north side of Louisiana, you would think that it would qualify as a fairly conservative city. While that's accurate to a certain extent, Shreveport's main tourism draw is gambling. The southern city boasts several casinos and a racetrack, Louisiana Downs.

The Remingtion Suite Hotel is the highest end option available to travelers to Shreveport, but remember that while the city is a preferable stop along I-20, the number of elite hotels is few and far between. For a football weekend though, that's no huge problem. In fact, it's secretly kind of a bonus. It also means you can "go big" here or simply keep your budget down for other nightlife options. The Holiday Inn Shreveport West offers reasonable rates and easy access to the airport and stadium. For travelers on a tight budget, we recommend the Tajun Inn. Accommodations are meager, but they offer a convenient location and rooms for less than US$100 per night.

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!