Games to Watch Saturday: Mississippi State Bowl Foes

While no one knows yet which bowl game will select Mississippi State, Bulldog fans do know that the Maroon and White will play in either the Liberty Bowl or in the BBVA Compass Bowl. With that known, fans can figure out which games to watch this weekend to catch a glimpse at potential bowl opponents.

Should the Bulldogs be selected for Birmingham, they would be slated to play a team from the American Athletic Conference. Currently four teams from the conference are bowl eligible: UCF, Louisville, Cincinnati, and Houston. SMU and Rutgers both need wins this weekend to become bowl eligible. This is important to Mississippi State because the AAC needs five eligible teams to send a squad to the BBVA Compass Bowl. If both SMU and Rutgers lose, the BBVA will be able to select an at-large team to travel to Birmingham. That at large team could be Oregon State, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Ohio, and maybe Washington State. To keep a pulse on the action, check out AAC football this weekend.

• No. 15 UCF at SMU, 11 am on ESPN
• South Florida at Rutgers, 6:30 pm on ESPN 2

This could be fun to watch as SMU will have a hard time upsetting UCF, and Rutgers should defeat the the Bulls, but the Scarlet Knights have struggled a bit recently.

If the Bulldogs head up to Memphis, their opponent will be the winner of the C-USA championship game. That game will feature the Marshall Thundering Herd traveling to Rice to take on the Owls. With both teams tied in conference and not playing each other, the conference determined home-field advantage for the game using a BCS style tiebreaker. While almost everyone agrees that Marshall is the better team, the potentially flawed tiebreaker process put Rice as the better team. The C-USA championship game takes place at 11 am on ESPN 2.