OUTBACK BOWL PICKS AND ANALYSIS: NORTHWESTERN VS. AUBURN

New Years’ Day bowl action will get underway bright and early at 8:00 AM Pacific with the Outback Bowl in Tampa, Florida.  The game features a matchup of the SEC and Big 10 as Northwestern takes on Auburn.  Northwestern is playing a January bowl game for the first time since 1997, winning five of their last six after a 2-2 start to finish 8-4.  Auburn struggled during SEC conference play, but finished with a 7-5 mark to reach their sixth bowl game in eight seasons.  The college football betting line on the game has Auburn installed as a -7’ favorite with the total set at 54’.

For Northwestern, a bowl victory has been a long time coming.  The Wildcats haven’t won a bowl game in sixty years, last defeating California in the 1949 Rose Bowl in their first ever postseason appearance.  They wouldn’t play in another bowl game until 1995, and they lost that year and six more times since then.  The lost last season at the Alamo Bowl, falling 30-23 in overtime to Missouri.

Auburn, meanwhile, has a very solid postseason resume with five of six bowl games since 2002.  The only loss in that span came against Wisconsin in the 2006 Capital One Bowl.  They failed to make a bowl game last year with a 5-7 record, and struggled down the stretch this year in new coach Gene Chizik’s first season at the helm.  Auburn opened the year 4-0, but lost 5 of their final 7 games.  

Line seems high, likely based as much on the SEC vs. Big 10 matchup as anything else.  Auburn has good team speed, but is otherwise a fairly pedestrian SEC team.  Northwestern may not have the big play capability of Auburn, but they’re a team that has built a reputation for hard nosed, scrappy play under head coach Pat Fitzgerald.  They’ve become year in and year out one of the best underdogs in college football.  This season they were 5-2 ATS as an underdog with a perfect 3-0 mark as a dog in this price range (3’ to 10 points).  Over the past three years they’re 13-7 ATS as a dog, with a 5-0 mark in the aforementioned spread range.  Not only have they covered pointspreads when getting points, but they’ve won outright as well. They’ve won a total of 8 games outright as dogs in the past two seasons, with 12 outright victories in the past four seasons.  They’ll be in this one throughout and could pull the outright upset.

Bet the Outback Bowl Northwestern vs. Auburn at Sports-1.