Happy Citrus Bowl Eve to all who celebrate! Today saw the Illinois Fighting Illini and the South Carolina Gamecocks complete their pregame walk-throughs, as Citrus Bowl practices completed.
So with that, let’s get to the highlights of the final two days preceding the game.
Citrus Bowl FYIs
#15 South Carolina Gamecocks vs #20 Illinois Fighting Illini
Kickoff: Tue. Dec. 31, 3pm EST (Fun fact: this will be the first Citrus Bowl not on Jan. 1 of Jan 2 since 2016.
Spread: South Carolina -9.5, Money Line -360, U/O 47.5, ESPN Analytics South Carolina 72.4%
TV: ABC, Mark Jones (play-by-play), Roddy Jones (analyst), Quint Kessenich (reporter)
Illini Football Material: History Nuggets & Tidbits Coaching History Part 1 Coaching History Part 2 Coaching History Part 3
Citrus Bowl Opt-Outs Illini Football 2022 vs 2024 Bret Bielema’s Bold Bling
The Citrus Bowl has a J.V. game (well, two junior varsity games actually, but we’re not going to talk Cure Bowl right now) in the Pop-Tarts Bowl. And the Pop-Tarts Bowl is certainly a thing.
It is indeed a spectacle to behold, to say the least.
The European mind can’t comprehend the #PopTartsBowl pic.twitter.com/88xr9XP9rm
— S Λ Μ (@sighsamuel) December 28, 2024
Said Illini coach Bret Bielema on Monday:
“even the Pop-Tart Bowl the other night, culminated, as I said yesterday, by the sacrifice of a Pop-Tart, which I thought was pretty awesome to watch and witness.”
Can’t disagree with any of that.
So the Pop Tart mascot toasted and eaten alive in a pagan ritual last year just came back to life to the chorus of Handel’s Messiah.
How is this not already the National Championship bowl game #PopTartBowl pic.twitter.com/u33m4fFs9F
— Dan Jimenez (@TheDanJimenez) December 28, 2024
Moving on to something really interesting that South Carolina coach Shane Beamer said earlier today. He is right about one of the unintended consequences from the College Football Playoff expansion/having the first round of games on campus/not on a neutral site bowl game.
“I said this back in Columbia and probably took some criticism for it, like I was saying that I didn’t want to be in the playoff, but I hate the part of the playoff if you make the playoff and you lose the first round, your season is over and it’s just an away game,” Beamer said.
“All you do is if you go play whoever, Penn State, you leave on Friday, you go to State College, PA, you play the game and you come home. That’s it.
“Great for them, don’t get me wrong, I would have loved to have been in the playoff, but the fact that we get to come down here and spend a week in Orlando and our guys get to go have fun together and create great memories.
“At dinner last night, someone was asking me what’s your favorite bowl game that you’ve been to either as a player or coach, and you just start going back through the years, and there’s so many awesome memories from all the different bowl games that I’ve had a chance to experience.
“It’s one of the things that makes college football so great, and just hope and pray that as college football continues to evolve that bowl games won’t be affected in an adverse way.”
More food for thought from Bielema, on the overall state of college football.
“What I don’t like is I think the one misleading fact of this whole world is graduation rates,” Bielema said.
“We have a thing called APR that they can actually track every head coach has an APR ranking that is trackable on the NCAA website, and part of the reason I’ve been able to get jobs that I’ve got is, because of that APR ranking.
“We’re a good football team, good players, but I believe in graduating kids, and part of this whole transition thing when kids transfer from school to school is they throw off their graduation rates, and there are a lot of kids that will make final-year decisions that will forego graduating.
“It’s all great right now and NIL is great.
“The chance to play in the NFL is awesome, but I think about a lot of kids 10, 15 years down the road. They’re going to be doing a “30 for 30” on sometimes we are living in right now, and that upsets me as a head coach. But, it is crazy.
“To have a kid on your team today that you realize you might play in your opener on another football team is just a crazy world that we’re living in, but it also makes it fun.
Paul M. Banks is the Founding Editor of The Sports Bank. He’s also the author of “Transatlantic Passage: How the English Premier League Redefined Soccer in America,” and “No, I Can’t Get You Free Tickets: Lessons Learned From a Life in the Sports Media Industry.”
He currently contributes to USA Today’s NFL Wires Network, the Internet Baseball Writers Association of America and RG. His past bylines include the New York Daily News, Sports Illustrated and the Chicago Tribune. His work has been featured in numerous outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, the Washington Post and ESPN. You can follow him on Linked In and Twitter.