Every day (or so) for the next month I will be previewing one of the upcoming college bowl games. I will give my thoughts on the teams playing, players to be on the lookout for, and a general overview of the bowl.

This may be the bowl game that the fewest people care about. Troy and Rice are the two teams lucky enough to be able to make the trip down to New Orleans to compete in the R&L Carriers New Orleans bowl. I don’t know what R&L Carriers does, but it’s probably more exciting than this game will be.

Rice is coming out of Conference USA and actually put together a tough schedule for the year. Unfortunately the tough teams they scheduled took them to the woodshed including losses to Texas and Florida State by a combined score of 107-14. Ouch. With that said, I give them credit for not just putting together a cupcake schedule and running the table just to get into a bowl game. And their game against UCLA was much closer, a 26-16 loss. Those are three of their five losses all year, so at least there weren’t too many shameful losses, like the one suffered to 4-8 Tulane. Rice is lead by a rushing attack featuring Quinton Smith and quarterback Chase Clement. For the passing game, Rice is almost completely reliant upon Jarrett Dillard, who has caught 20 of their 27 touchdown passes on the year. He also has nearly half of their receiving yards with 1176. Considering he is a 5′11″ 160 lbs. sophomore, I wouldn’t think he would be that hard to contain. Shut him down, and you shut the passing game down, then you can load 8 in the box. It’s a simple enough defensive strategy to beat Rice, and with their defensive struggles this year, giving up 32.6 points per game, Rice looks like they could be vulnerable.

These vulnerabilites would be good new for Troy, except for the fact that they are Troy. Out of the powerhouse Sunbelt Conference comes Troy. They too scheduled some tricky games against non-conference teams, but unfortunately had little more success than Rice. They took a rough 56-0 beating at the hands of Nebraska, but played Florida State close, losing 24-17. Troy is basically mediocre at everything. Their offense isn’t anything to write home about, they don’t average over 200 yards passing and quarterback Omar Haugabook has 16 interceptions to go with his 17 touchdowns. Their rushing attack is the only thing that seems to be keeping them in games offensively, and that isn’t anything spectacular either. Their leading rusher has accumulated only four touchdowns on the year. Troy finds themselves relying upon their defense which probably isn’t a good thing when the defense is giving up 22 points per game.

If you look at how these two teams fared against shared opponent, Troy obviously has the edge. Their 24-17 loss to Florida State isn’t as bad as the 55-7 shellacking Rice took against the same team. It is all going to come down to Rice’s ability to stop the Troy offense. If they can do that, I think they’ll be able to must up enough offense to win. And I see that happening. Troy probably isn’t good enough to shut down the Rice offense, and I think the Rice defense is better than the stats indicate.

My prediction: Rice wins.