The Middle Tennessee Blue Raider football squad ended the 2009 regular season with a 38-19 win at Louisiana-Monroe Saturday, Nov. 28.
MTSU finished the season with a 9-3 record, and a runner-up place in the Sun Belt Conference standings. The nine victories are the most in Blue Raider history since moving to the Football Bowl Subdivision in 1999. The last time MTSU finished the season with at least nine wins was 17 years ago, when they were 10-3.
The victory was the sixth in a row for the Blue Raiders, and they haven’t dropped a contest since the home loss to SEC member Mississippi State in October.
The season, however, might not be over for MTSU. The Blue Raiders last appeared in a bowl game in 2006, which came during current head coach Rick Stockstill’s first season at the helm. They ended that season with a loss to Central Michigan in the Motor City Bowl (now called the Little Caesar’s Pizza Bowl) in Detroit.
The Blue Raiders have enough wins to be eligible for postseason play, and they should be heading to a bowl. The question is which one?
Troy also won on Saturday, which clinched its fourth consecutive SBC title, and now that team looks to be headed to the R & L Carriers New Orleans Bowl on Dec. 19.
So which bowl will welcome the Blue Raiders?
According to the SBC rules, the conference has tie-ins with three other bowls, the Papajohns.com Bowl in Birmingham, the St. Petersburg Bowl and the Independence Bowl in Shreveport, La. However, those spots can only be filled with a SBC program if the conferences that have the tie-in do not have enough teams to occupy that spot.
Confused? Wait there is more.
With this past weekend’s games being completed, it looks like those three bowls just mentioned will be able to cover all of their spots without using a SBC team.
That being said, several other conferences will not have enough teams to fill all of their bowl obligations. The Blue Raiders will be one of the first teams that bowls will be looking at to complete their match up.
In the past several weeks, the ESPN and Sports Illustrated websites have had MTSU headed all over the country. Some of those predictions have included heading the New Mexico Bowl, the Eagle Bank Bowl in Washington, D.C. and maybe back to Detroit, with several other bowls having also been mentioned.
Dwight Dasher
“I feel pretty good about being 9-3,” Dasher said after Saturday’s game. “The season isn’t over with, but we feel pretty good about ending up with a good record. I felt like even though we started off slow, I felt like ever since camp we had a hard working team and that nobody could beat us. I am happy to be 9-3, but we should have started off faster. You just have to keep your head up and you know you will make up for it. If we don’t go to a bowl game something’s wrong.”
