2024: North Texas to First Responder Bowl

vs Texas State

Maybe you were like me, watching the conference title games college playoff discussion so you could get the news you really wanted to hear: where North Texas was playing in the bowl.

We have our news: The Servpro F1rst Responder Bowl at Gerald J. Ford Stadium.

A couple of things: you likely have been to this stadium, as it is the home of the SMUs and up until recently, NT played here every-other-year. Also, this is the old Heart of Dallas Bowl.

You might recall that North Texas’ last bowl win was in said HoD Bowl. It was played on January 1st, 2014. This bowl replaced the old Cotton Bowl Classic, as that was moved to Arlington. It was very cool to see little old North Texas in the venerable Cotton Bowl stadium. If you haven’t been, but have been to Rice’s stadium, or something else of that era you have an idea of what it is like.

In 2019, because of the NHL Winter Classic, the bowl “temporarily” moved to Gerald Ford stadium but has remained there ever since.

What does a cursory glance at the history of the First Responder Bowl tell us? For me, it seems that teams from nearby do better at filling the seats than those from far away. Washington and USM? Only 20K. UNT and UNLV? 38K. Oklahoma State brought 48K people on Jan 1, 2013. That also reminds me that the January games do better than any of the other options. I wonder if that is why the FRB changed to January 3rd this year.

By the way we are the home team, and should buy on the West sideline.

We’ll have more details on the actual matchup. You may have seen that NT saw Chandler Morris, DT Sheffield, Tyler Mercer, and Oscar Hammond join the portal, among some other minor participants. The shape of the game will continue to change as we get closer. Remember, that anyone in the portal can always come back — the 5-star WR at TTU looks to have reversed course — and also, just being in the portal doesn’t mean you are off the team. You can play in the bowl even if that is extremely unlikely.

In any case, the bowl game is the second January game for North Texas in the history of the program. The first was the 2014 win over UNLV. A great time was had by MGN, who rushed the field, was chased by the security guard who let my friend go with nary a finger lifted¹and because of the beerverages was unstable enough to get a grass stain. I enjoyed it all.

HOD Bowl 2014

I did some quick math and it could be slightly wrong but the gist of it is this: we are not good at the post-season. In retrospect, it maybe isn’t fair to Seth Littrell to yell at him for his record in the bowls with three sub-.500 teams, but also they got smoked so it is hard to not yell. Anyway,

• NT is 2-10 in Bowl Games

• NT is 1-8 before Christmas averaging 20.89 vs 38 allowed, and 19,743.11 attendance

• NT is 1-10 in December, averaging 20.64, allowing 37,09, with 29.982.27 watching

• NT is 1-0 in January — :D

• NT is 1-4 in Louisiana

• NT is 0-2 in New Mexico

• NT is 1-1 in Dallas with the crowd at 38,748.50

• NT is 0-2 in Frisco with the crowd at 11,966

• NT is 1-7 in Non-Texas games.

• I want go to the New Orleans Bowl Again.

• Best attended Bowl game: HOD Bowl 2016 vs Army.

• Worst non-covid attended game: Frisco Classic vs Miami(OH) 11,721

• Score the most in Dallas (33.5)

• Score the worst in New Mexico (10.5)

• Allow the most in Louisiana (34.4)

• Allow the least in Texas (25.33)

1. We all know why!