Favorite Bulldog Moments of 2016: No. 7 - Going to a Bowl

The Mississippi St. Bulldogs will play in the St. Petersburg Bowl tomorrow at 10 a.m. central time. The fact this is a true statement is hard to believe when you consider all that happened prior to this moment during the 2016 football season.

When the Bulldogs lost their opening game to South Alabama, myself and many other fans thought this season was shot. South Alabama proved to not be a total dumpster fire, but they aren’t a good team. While there might have been some overreactions happening across the fans, there was plenty of reason to think the season was going to be really bad.

Finishing the season with a losing record still stinks. And there has been a lot of negativity surrounding the bowl announcement because it is played the day after Christmas and is so early in the day. There’s also the fact the bowl payout is pretty small by SEC standards at $500,000.

While all of those are legitimate gripes, it doesn’t outweigh the importance of a bowl game for this program. This team needed more experience playing together, and they received plenty of that during the bowl practices. But this team also needed more game experience together, and they’ll get that as well when they take the field against the Miami (OH) Redhawks.

This has been one of the strangest football seasons I can remember as Bulldog fan. There were lots of weird game times and strange things happened both on and off the field. So to end the season in a bow, even in the most unlikely of circumstances, still feels pretty good.