N. Illinois ruins large payout for conference
MAC school drops Oklahoma from a BCS bowl as Sooners will play A&M in Cotton on Jan. 4.
Next time the Big 12 considers expansion, don’t expect BCS-bustin’ Northern Illinois to land an invite. More appropriate would be a dart board with a big old Huskie in the bull’s-eye.
Northern Illinois’ surprise inclusion in the Bowl Championship Series lineup set off a chain reaction that dropped the pecking order of most Big 12 bowl teams and cost the conference an $18 million paycheck
Stanford (11-2) vs. Wisconsin (8-5)
N. Illinois (121) vs. Florida St. (11-2)
Florida (11-1) vs. Louisville (10-2)
Kansas St. (11-1) vs. Oregon (11-1) Notre Dame (12-0) vs. Alabama (12-1) that comes with a BCS at-large bid.
The Huskies (12-1), from DeKalb, Ill., earned the MidAmerican Conference’s flrst major bowl berth by reaching criteria for a non-BCS league team: flnishing in the top 16 (they were 15th) and ranking higher than at least one other BCS conference champ. Northern Illinois beat out two, the Big Ten’s Wisconsin and the Big East’s Louisville.
The grumbling is loudest, by far, in Oklahoma, which was all set for a Sugar Bowl trip to play No. 4 Florida. Instead of the French Quarter and New Orleans, the 12th-ranked Sooners will return to the Metroplex for the third time this season, where they’ll bump into a familiar foe, 10th-ranked Texas A&M, in the Cotton Bowl.
The Sugar’s loss is the Cotton’s