Phil Steele has Gamecocks in Outback Bowl this season
By Sydney Hunte
The dead of the summer season means predictions, preseason rankings and the like as we continue the march to the beginning of the 2014 college football in August.
One man who’s always busy around this time of year is Phil Steele. Today, Steele dropped his annual postseason bowl projections for the 2014 season, and he has the South Carolina Gamecocks in the Outback Bowl this upcoming season and taking on the Big Ten’s Iowa Hawkeyes.
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As expected, there are a large group of teams picked to play in a bowl from the SEC–11 in all. The full list is at the link above, but–spoiler alert–a certain school from Dixieland not named Auburn is projected to play in the Rose Bowl semifinal against Ohio State in the inaugural College Football Playoff. (Florida State and Oklahoma are in the Sugar Bowl semi.)
You might remember that Iowa and South Carolina have tangoed in the Outback Bowl before. In 2009’s edition in Tampa, current Tennessee Titans running back Shonn Greene and the Hawkeyes rushed out to a 31-0 lead en route to a 31-10 thrashing of the Gamecocks in Carolina’s first bowl game since the 2006 Liberty Bowl victory over Houston.
The school in the Upstate, by the way, made the list as well, and they’re paired with Florida in the Belk Bowl in Charlotte.
What do you think? Is Steele way off base or way on target with his projections this year? Should it be the Gamecocks in the College Football Playoff and not one of the teams that he’s listed on there?