New Mexico Bowl 2018 Mountain West v C-USA

The 15th December 2018 is a busy day for College Bowl games and the 13th playing of the New Mexico Bowl will hopefully live up to its history of producing great games (2012 anyone). Utah State will be looking to repeat their 2014 win while North Texas are making their first appearance in this particular fixture.

Both have (on paper anyway) pretty impressive winning records with Utah State racking up Ten and New Mexico Nine. The critics will point to Utahs relatively easy schedule, however, their only defeats came to teams ranked in the top 25 – including a credible 38-31 loss at Michigan State to open the season. MSU may have ended unranked at 7-5 but they had a beast of a schedule and we would rank a 7 point loss to them as far better than a cupcake win. Speaking of which it is hard to point to a wow win but victories over BYU, Hawaii and Wyoming are not too shabby. They also play in what is probably the second strongest of the Group of Five conferences this season and are to us strong favourites.

The Mean Green have had – by any standards a terrific season and the 44-17 routing of SEC Arkansas will long live in the memory. However, the days are dark in Arkansas at the moment and subsequent results although good did show some weaknesses. Their Loss to Louisiana Tech was not good and neither was blowing a 28 point lead against Old Dominion. They scraped their last two wins by 3 points each and looked to be fading as the season wore on.

Overall Utah has been averaging over 47 points a game and nearly 500 yards of offence and we don’t think North Texas can hang with them in a shootout. Still, it should be a great game for the neutral.

Our prediction Utah State 42-21

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