Rating the Pinstripe Bowl: College football's latest Bronx tale

Bowls: There are a lot of them. As a public service, the Doc is here to rank each game according to five crucial criteria, with help from the patron saint of the game in question. Today: The Pinstripe Bowl!

Teams. Kansas State Wildcats (7-5) vs. Syracuse Orange (7-5).
Particulars. Today, 3:20 p.m. ET on ESPN.
Favorite: Pick 'em.
Patron Saint: Seventeenth-century Swedish immigrant Jonas Bronck, who left Scandanavia in the 1630s for the Dutch colony of New Netherland. He settled on a piece of farmland on the northern bank of the Harlem River, lending his name to the river that butted against the land: Bronck's River, later misappropriated as the Bronx.

• Locale. Unlike the one-way disaster at Wrigley Field, Yankee Stadium's late-November dry run between Notre Dame and Army came off without a hitch – even if it did take them a little longer than it probably should have to pull off the transition:

Points deducted because – location and lore notwithstanding – it is a baseball field, almost exclusively: The ND-Army affair was the first major college football game in the Bronx since the 1987 Urban League Classic between Grambling and Central (Ohio) State in the old Yankee Stadium. But if you have to play on a baseball field, you can do a lot worse.

    More 2010 Bowl Ratings
  • Dec. 17: New Mexico Bowl
  • Dec. 18: Humanitarian Bowl
  • Dec. 18: New Orleans Bowl
  • Dec. 22: Maaco Bowl Las Vegas
  • Dec. 23: Poinsettia Bowl
  • Dec. 24: Hawaii Bowl
  • Dec. 26: Little Caesars Bowl
  • Dec. 27: Independence Bowl
  • Dec. 28: Champs Sports Bowl
  • Dec. 29: Texas Bowl
  • Dec. 29: Alamo Bowl

• Tradition. The Pinstripe Bowl is new, but New York has more of a place in college football history than it gets credit for: National powerhouses Notre Dame and Army clashed annually in various Gotham venues in the twenties, thirties and forties, and the old Yankee Stadium regularly hosted games by local teams from NYU and Fordham before the rise of the NFL (and the increasing commercialization of the "amateur" game) began to overtake college football in the Northeast in the fifties.

The Big Apple even notches a footnote in bowl history as host to the Gotham Bowl in 1961 and 1962, featuring such far-flung participants as Baylor, Utah State, Nebraska and Miami – none of which, it turns out, were very enthusiastic about braving the north Atlantic winters, even to raise money for the March of Dimes, leading to the game's rapid demise after just two years. The old Polo Grounds in upper Manhattan hosted the first Gotham Bowl in '61, less than three years before the storied stadium was demolished (at least it outlived the Gotham Bowl), and the 'Huskers and Hurricanes met for the first time in the postseason not in the Orange Bowl, as they would so many times for big stakes in the eighties and nineties, but in Yankee Stadium in 1962.

That, however, was then. A spanking new game in a spanking new venue still has to earn its, uh, stripes.

• Swag. The Pinstripe Bowl is one of the few games that has refused to disclose the contents of its gift bags to players. They do realize the NCAA says it's okay, right?
No Rating.

• Sponsors, trophies and other ambiance. The theme of the week: Snow. cancel an event in Times Square. Of course, being snowed under in Manhattan, N.Y., isn't like being snowed under in Manhattan, Kan.: Both teams held practices in the New York Giants and New York Jets' indoor facilities and were able to make the regular sightseeing rounds – including, reportedly, some cross country skiers gliding down the middle of Fifth Avenue.

The forecast for today's game, for the record, is a clear, balmy 40 degrees.

• This year's match-up. The good news for Syracuse: After five years of relentlessly rock-bottom defenses, the Orange incredibly turned in the nation's fifth-ranked total defense, holding five of seven Big East opponents below 300 yards. The bad news: The typically morose Orange offense maxed out in conference play at 308 yards, in a 45-14 loss to Pittsburgh, en route to finishing 106th nationally.

Those numbers were bad even in the offensively challenged Big East, where Kansas State's middling attack – ranked ninth in the Big 12 – would have finished as the No. 2 total offense. With a pair of old-school, defensive-minded coaches trotting out inconsistent quarterbacks in less-than-ideal weather, the adjective "grinding" comes to mind.

• Star power. Expect, then, to see plenty of the two 1,000-yard tailbacks, Delone Carter (Syracuse) and Daniel Thomas (Kansas State) in their final college game. Thomas, a 6-foot-2, 228-pound scout favorite who led the Big 12 in rushing for the second straight season, may be the most imposing specimen the Orange defense has faced since Jake Locker went off for 300 total yards and four touchdowns in early September.

Final rating: out of five.
Syracuse's last bowl win? Over Kansas State in the 2001 Insight Bowl. Kansas State's only "major" bowl win? Over Syracuse in the 1998 Fiesta Bowl. If only Donovan McNabb and Michael Bishop were the quarterbacks in this one.

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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.

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