Cartoon Artist Picks Georgetown over MSU in 1940 Orange Bowl

Google news archives is an amazing thing; you can find all sorts of interesting articles and bits of information on anything, really simply by searching for keywords in their archive search. Last night, in the spirit of MSU's upcoming bowl selection, I set out searching the Google archives for any information that I could find on MSU's most notable early bowl trips to the Orange Bowl in the late 30s and early 40s.

One bit of cool information that I came upon in my search was the below cartoon from a December 27, 1940 edition of the Milwaukee Journal (cartoon at the bottom left-hand corner of the page). In it, the artist, who I can only assume had the last name Krenz, makes his selections for the bowl games that season using some interesting sketches. Not only is it neat to see this because of its age, but it is also interesting to me because of the teams that made bowl games back then (Fordham? Western Reserve?). As you may or may not know, there were quite a few less bowls back then than the 35 thousand that we have now, so receiving a postseason invitation back then was a big deal. Another quick search reveals that the bowl games for that year were as follows:

Sun Bowl - Western Reserve Spartans vs. Arizona State Bulldogs
Rose Bowl - Stanford Indians vs. Nebraska Cornhuskers
Sugar Bowl - Boston College Eagles vs. Tennessee Volunteers
Cotton Bowl - Texas A&M Aggies vs. Fordham Rams
Orange Bowl - Mississippi State Bulldogs vs. Georgetown Hoyas

State would go on to win that game, by the way, defeating the Georgetown Hoyas 14-7. So take that, Mr. Krenz!