What is a Music City Bowl Anyway?

Hello and welcome to another exciting edition of Purdue football bowl games. Today we will talk about a group of northerners who have traveled down South to fight a group of southerners in their backyard in order to defend our country’s most precious commodity. I’m talking of course about the B1G defending college football’s Union from the secessionist demands of Mickey Mouse.

WHO: Purdue Boilermakers (8-4 and defender of the B1G-ACC-PAC Alliance) and the Tennessee Volunteers (7-5 and members of a southeastern confederation conference trying to secede from the NCAA so that they can use football to distract from their “educational achievements” and make more money).

WHAT: The battle will take place at something called the Music City Bowl and is sponsored by GENERIC BOWL SPONSOR that MNWildcat isn’t paying me to mention. Also I see no reason to provide free media coverage for GENERIC BOWL SPONSOR when GENERIC BOWL SPONSOR shouldn’t be sponsoring a bowl game. If you aren’t selling your products to the general public (ie: Culvers, Arby’s, or OffTackleEmpire), you really should NOT be wasting your money by sponsoring a bowl game. But I’m sure all the employees of GENERIC BOWL SPONSOR appreciate the fact they didn’t get bonuses this year so that GENERIC BOWL SPONSOR could sponsor a bowl game that won’t increase their business.

WHEN: SOON™ (Thursday, December 30th). Battle lines to be formed around 3PM

WHERE: A National Football League Stadium (CAR COMPANY STADIUM located in Nashville, Tennessee). Yes, that’s right recruits. Come play football at Purdue and you too can play in the NFL* instead of the MLB* like Minnesota Gophers football players.

*stadiums

For the degenerates looking for a TV channel to watch this competition, try ESPN. I’m not entirely sure that’s right, but it sounds right and I can’t be bothered to conduct a five second search of the internet to verify.

WHY: Because Purdue’s smallish fanbase wasn’t considered big enough to go play in a bigger bowl game. Which to be fair, I’m neither traveling to the game nor watching live (I forgot about when it was and am taking one of my nephews to see the Washington Generals beat the Harlem Globetrotters during the Purdue game). If the best college football website’s designated Purdue “writer” can’t even be bothered to watch live, let alone attend - should Purdue really be going to the Outback Bowl over 7-5 Penn State?

The answer is yes because Purdue didn’t need 9 overtimes to lose to Illinois. The Boilermakers even beat Illinois!

HOW: I would assume Purdue will be passing the ball 60 times, rushing twice for a total of 3 yards, and Tennessee will score some points. Although I’m told the last Music City Bowl was won by something called Iowa (happy belated birthday, you only look a day over 175) and it went like this:

Hopefully we don’t see a repeat of the 2020 game.

HISTORY: The Battle of Nashville was a two day affair fought in December of 1864. In one of the biggest victories achieved by the Union during the Civil War, Major General George H. Thomas attacked and routed traitor Lieutenant General John Bell Hood’s army, resulting in the end of the Army of Tennessee traitors as an effective fighting force. This battle occurred following the aftermath of Sherman’s capture and burning of Atlanta.

Hood sought to disrupt Sherman’s supply lines in Tennessee so that Sherman would abandon Atlanta. Sherman decided that a) he didn’t need supply lines and b) Thomas could handle things in Tennessee and didn’t take the bait that Hood was offering. Instead Sherman and his men took a leisurely stroll thru Georgia down to the beach at Savannah casually gathering supplies as they went along. Meanwhile, Hood - not knowing that Sherman didn’t actually need a supply line - went ahead with his attempt to disrupt the supply lines in Tennessee.

The Union forces in Tennessee at the time were divided between Major General John Schofield and Thomas. Hood attempted to pursue and engage Schofield before he could link up with Thomas and their combined forces would outnumber him. But miscommunication at Spring Hill allowed Schofield and the Union men to slip past him. Then at Franklin, Hood called for a suicidal charge against a dug in Schofield which resulted in a defeat. Schofield was able to continue towards Nashville where he would fall under the command of Thomas and their linked up forces now outnumbered Hood’s pursuing force by almost a 2:1 margin.

After both sides stared down each other for two weeks and Grant threatened to sack Thomas multiple times for his refusal to play football fight in winter weather, Thomas ordered the attack on December 15th. Sending a diversionary force to distract Hood and hold down one wing of the Confederate line, the majority of Thomas’s force swept around to flank the other end of the line. They overcame the Confederates but it was a slow process as Hood didn’t completely fall for the diversion and the pursuit was halted due to night falling. This allowed Hood to reform the line a couple of miles to the south.

The following day Thomas repeated his maneuver and this time the distraction worked better than the previous day. Thomas’s forces soon captured the hills (one of which was later named after a Confederate military leader that died that day - because the South likes remembering Confederates for some reason) and Hood’s army was much reduced in force. The diminished remnants would retreat, but Tennessee was securely in Union hands for the remainder of the rebellion.

Since 1998, the Music City Bowl has been scheduled annually. I assume its purpose is to commemorate the Battle of Nashville and remind modern day Tennesseans Tennesseites twitter followers of Clay Travis that the Civil War was a thing and that it wasn’t fought over state rights. Schools from the Union states are 9-5 in this bowl game against schools from the states that made up the Confederacy.

Tennessee in 1-1 in Music City Bowl history last beating the #24 (lol) Nebraska Cornhuskers 38-24 in what was probably Nebraska’s last bowl appearance of the 21st century. Purdue is FILE_NOT_FOUND in the Music City Bowl and is participating in their first bowl game since 2017 as their 6-6 2018 team mysteriously did not play in a bowl game that year. Not really sure why - hey, did you guys know Purdue graduates were the first and most recent (hopefully not last ever) people on the moon? Or that Purdue basketball has had at least one seven footer on the roster every year since the 2012-13 season?

TENNESSEE: Tennessee is in contention for one of the worst fanbases in college sports. Not only did they not hire Greg Schiano because of the delusional ravings of twitter madman Clay Travis - visiting Tennessee fans please note that Greg Schiano is participating in the much more prestigious and higher in the SEC pecking order Gator Bowl this year - but they also caused a game to be temporarily put on hold for twenty minutes this season when they starting throwing trash on the field and mustard bottles/golf balls at Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin.

Calvin Mattheis/News Sentinel / USA TODAY NETWORK

For the record, it’s not just me that thinks Tennessee’s fanbase is bad. In 2019, a twitter poll run by some reporter named Darren Rovell found Tennessee to be the 4th most annoying fanbase. Sports Illustrated writer Pat Forde calls the Volunteers fanbase “petulant”. Yahoo Sports writer Pete Thamel has suggested they are the worst fan base in college football.

Tennessee hasn’t won a conference championship since 1998. Even lowly Purdue has won a conference championship since then. And yet their fanbase expects to regularly be at the top of the SEC for some reason and compete for national titles. But they can’t even get past Nick Saban every once in a while, when Nick Saban isn’t even that good of a coach. After all, Saban has a losing record against Purdue. It’s not that difficult to beat him.

This year’s Tennessee squad arrived at a 7-5 record by losing to Pittsburgh (New Year’s Six Bowl), Ole Miss (New Year’s Six Bowl), Alabama (CFP), and Georgia (CFP) as well as Florida. So they can certainly lose to “good” teams and also Florida. They did beat Bowling Green (harder than it looks, right Minnesota?), Tennessee Tech (FCS), Mizzou (6-7), South Carolina (currently 6-6), Kentucky, South Alabama (5-7), and Vanderbilt (2-10).

So I don’t know. It mostly looks like they beat bad teams and Kentucky and lost to really good teams and Florida. The stats tell me they are good at scoring. give up a bunch of points in return, and like to run the ball.

PURDUE: Since I happened to mention that Tennessee’s fanbase isn’t considered the “greatest and most humble fans on Earth” - that’s apparently Nebraska - I’ll be fair and say that Purdue’s fanbase isn’t the best in the world either. After all the Purdue fanbase contains me: BoilerUp89. Plus our other computer generated Purdue users. You will know who we are in the comments by our usernames.

I’m not going to sugar coat this one, Boilermaker fans. This game likely isn’t going to go well unless the SEC is just clownfraudtrasch this year - which is possible since last I checked the SEC hasn’t won a bowl game this season and the conference didn’t exactly rack up big non-con wins. Stars David Bell and George Karlaftis have opted out (rightfully so, go get paid gentlemen) and other reliable contributors are either definitely out (WR Milton Wright and CB Dedrick Mackey) or doubtful (LT Greg Long). I’m not going to speculate too much on why Wright and Mackey are out other than to say it isn’t COVID or injury and the academic semester just ended.

Without Bell and Wright or Rice and Yaseen (both injured and out for the season) at WR, Purdue’s receiver core is a little thin for this game. Jackson Anthrop, T.J. Sheffield, and Broc Thompson will have to lead the way but most of the down field options are gone and we are probably looking at more intermediate routes and more involvement of the TE group. It’s not like Purdue has a running game to fall back on. This isn’t the same offense that upset Iowa and Michigan State. Which is fine next year with Rice and Yaseen back plus a couple of incoming WR transfers and improvement from underclassmen, but going to make things rough sledding in this game.

Defensively, Purdue will see just how big of an impact Karlaftis really was. Tennessee likes to run the ball and Purdue struggled with some running teams this season, most notably wisconsin. If Purdue can keep Tennessee in the 20s or low 30s this may be a game, but I have a feeling that may be too high of an ask.

PREDICTION: As much as I would like for Purdue’s Anthrop Brothers era to end with a victory (super senior Jackson Anthrop was a freshman in 2016, his older brother Danny played football at Purdue from 2012 to 2015, and his even older brother Dru was a Purdue basketball walk-on from 2009-2013), I think Purdue will have to wait for 2022 to have their first 9 win season under Brohm (go look at that schedule before you laugh too hard). Tennessee volunteers for worst fanbase award 41 - Your Purdue Boilermakers 24.

Should you be attending the game or be around Tennessee fans during/after it feel free to remind them of this when they start talking shit: