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A little more attendance detail for the bowl game (this is year 4)... December 23, 2014 Marshall 52 Northern Illinois 23 - attendance: 29,419 December 22, 2015 Toledo 32 Temple 17 - attendance: 25,908 December 20, 2016 Western Kentucky 51 Memphis 31 - attendance; 24,726 Capacity for the stadium is just under 30k. Our students will already be out for the semester, so I don't expect a huge contingency - they have been relatively small but very loud all season in the North endzone. The bowl is run by the same group that puts on the Orange Bowl, so it is a class act and I think your players and coaches will be treated well and will enjoy the experience. And let's face it, the campus is 5 minutes from the beach and it will probably be upper-70s to around 80 degrees. So the fans that come should also enjoy it, too. Say what you will about Kiffin (and Briles), but coaching has been the difference. FAU got a lot of good and bad publicity for the "Last Chance U" stuff between signing day and our opening game, but in reality there are very few new players making a huge impact on the team - the biggest contributors are kids that were already on the roster or a true Freshman WR (Wright). John Franklin (grad-transfer from Auburn) has some highlights, but this has been kids who were 3-9 last year winning 10 games this year. Driskel (QB) was inserted as the starter against Buffalo and struggled that game, but since then we have gone even more up-tempo and started running all kinds of schemed running plays and teams have struggled to keep up. And our best WR (Woods) was suspended for the first half of the season, but watch the CUSA championship game and you can see he will most likely be playing on Sundays next year. Sorry for the long posts. I try to be respectful on other people's boards, but given we don't know much about each other I thought I would provide some insight into how the program has turned around, how this team has turned around since week 4, and some of the players to watch.

This came in todays mail. I always pay my gambling debts. No matter who on this board won the bet, tbe real winner was Zips Athletics.

^^I'm surprised you were able to get a picture of him without his shades on. But really, I do love his attitude/engagement. It is definitely noticeable. I hope he is utilized so that he can contribute in a big way next season.

Adding some more info regarding FAU's offense.... We are far from one-dimensional. Singletary is no-doubt our best player, and he leads the country with 29 rushing TDs. We didn't start feeding him the ball until the 4th game of the season. But we also run the ball with a number of different guys including WRs and our QB. Our backup RB has nearly 700 yards rushing, and as a team we are the #6 rushing team in the country (and Akron has the next to last rushing D in the MAC). That being said, we have been very creative on offense with trick plays, guys other than our QB throwing TDs, and when we do throw it we tend to complete LOTS of long passes because we run the ball so well. In the CUSA championship game we threw for around 350 yards and had one receiver set a record with over 200 yards. We also complete over 64% of our passes as a team. If you saw the Baylor offense in previous years just wear people out, that is similar to what we do (Kendal Briles is our OC so that shouldn't be a surprise). And as some of you have pointed out, we play fast. As a team, but especially on offense, we looked somewhat lost in the first several games. It took a month for the team to adapt to the new coaching staff and a fair amount of new players. North Texas is a good CUSA team, and in the 2 wins against them we had 804 yard and 69 points in the regular season and 633 and 41 points in the championship (but should have been more of yards and points - we had nearly 400 yards in the first half and had a 34-0 lead midway through the 3rd quarter). We may not show up for the bowl game, but if the last 10 weeks or so are any indication I would expect the offense to be a significant challenge for your defense. Also - the attendance. We have only had big crowds at 2 games (the first one against Navy had around 29k and our rivalry game with FIU had over 24k). But in the previous 3 Boca Bowls, the smallest crowd has been 24k. If you come, I think you will really like our stadium.

I thought Daniel probably deserved his own thread as we'll probably be talking about him a lot over the next 3 years. Here is a really good human-interest article from GT on Dan & how Groce has whipped him into better physical shape (Danie's gone from 19% to under 10% body fat). Sophomore Daniel Utomi trims the fat, takes lead role with Zips

If it wasn't for the gorgeous, year-round weather you guys have, you would think this is Akron. Are you sure "FAU_dad" isn't a typo? It could easily be UA_dad based on the similarities between the universities.

After reading that Big Dog is currently out of basketball, it makes me wonder how much better he would have been last year if he would have lost weight, slimmed down and hit the weight room. He had great offensive moves for such a big guy but that extra weight slowed him down. I like how we are now a stronger quicker team. This will only pay dividends. We need Poke to put on some weight and muscle to help him rebound. A missing part of his game. Looking forward to Utomi having another big night after a letdown in West Virginia.

Gotta love all this attention for The University of Akron. It seems to be coming fast and furious now. Thanks Zips Men's Soccer! GO ZIPS!!!

FAU's following (and really all of South Florida's) is somewhat apathetic towards sports. People like winners, so I expect the following to get better just like has been seen with Miami playing a couple of high-profile games against VT and Notre Dame a few weeks ago. But with so much other stuff going on in and around the area college football has taken even a worse beating regarding fan attendance here than it has in other places. The bowl season and the number of visitors we always start getting this time of year will help (golf courses are full and charge about twice the normal rate from December to April). Even so, I also don't expect those numbers are butts in seats but are tickets sold. It will help being a night game, it will hurt being the only game on ESPN, and it will hurt being a Tuesday. And if we eliminate a few thousand students attending the game, I am guessing the stadium will be lucky to have 20k actually there in-person but will report 25k as the attendance from ticket sales. The school itself has about 30k students, but that is spread over like 5 different campuses. Boca is the main campus, but is still a relatively new school and is emerging from being a commuter school to a growing university. There are only something like 4000 on-campus beds (dorms and university apartments) in Boca.

Tickets sold? Or butts in the seats?

It sure feels good to BE P5-level, cream-of-the-cream. Excellence is fun - GO ZIPS!!!!

White out tonight, with first 500 in the door getting a t-shirt. Excitement is building.

For us cheapskates, I'm really excited that parking is free in the stadium lots HAHA. I'm making the six hour drive with a friend on Sunday morning, if the Zips win on Friday.

Very very very rarely do they give out full rides. Maybe the top 10 recruits in a given year will get a full ride for 5 years.

Didn't know he had de-committed from Virginia. I'm interested! He must have at least one solid offer to de-commit, no? Recruiting is a strange game. Just my 2 cents on what his decommitment might mean: You could very well be right about him having a solid offer for football elsewhere but... You can really never get a good "read" on the tea leaves unless you have inside information (family, etc.). It could be that he decommitted so that other schools who might be interested would continue to recruit him. Some schools will move on to other targets if a guy is committed. For blue chip players and P5 programs, that's obviously not the case as coaches will continue to try to get those guys often into the wee hours before singing day. For the other 99% of prospects, if you appear to be locked into a school, some programs will not waste the time/energy in trying to "flip" you. So, maybe he wanted to show programs he was available; especially as a football prospect.

I'm not sure I would advertise that.

I too am glad to have new voices here, but you've posted twice...once to rip me about a humorous post (at least I tried it to be) about Jared's shirt selecton at an earlier match and now ME87s post that was made a week before the match....you come on and question him after the match???? Maybe come on the forum a little more, read up on our comments and don't get all "attack doggy" on us, please?

You spelled "sensible" wrong lol.

Maybe I am a little cynical, but I suspect they would not be making such a statement if they were travelling to Boise for the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl.

Listening to WKNR just now. Aaron and Tony both think we're gonna have a great game and they're considering going down there to broadcast live. It may just be polite talk of course (Akron is a station sponsor), but if I'm the U of A I'm doing whatever I can to make that happen.

I have also heard the radio comments claiming that we've stopped one-dimensional offenses. But if OU is the example, they rushed for 282 yards, at 6.6 per carry, and put 34 points on the board. We were fortunate to score 37 that night, which was very unexpected. So, right now I'm thinking a lot more about what we can do to score near 40 points, rather than resting my hopes on containing an FAU offense that's been scoring a lot of points consistently.

Hi guys. I'm an FAU fan that's watched all of our games and seen the progression of our team through the season. This is correct in that our running game is substantially better than our passing game. Some teams have tried to shutdown our run by adding an extra safety but it hasn't really worked yet. I think lane understands this so we've been emphazing our passing game all season. And I would agree that we do still lean on our running game, but every week our passing game continues to make huge strides. I think that article is from early November? But since then our passing game has improved dramatically. We don't make many passing plays, maybe 20 the whole game, but our completion rate in November has been 80% or higher. We also rarely throw interceptions - Just four the entire season. Our tempo is killer. We move way faster than the chain crew (they usually run to catch up). This one time we ran 4-5 plays and scored in less than 30 seconds, just imagine how fast we are. And I think what makes it so hard is our offense has a lot of moving parts and trick plays. I think a good way to watch that offense is to look at our conference championship game last week.

I heard Detweiler say that the Zips have been very successful in shutting down one dimension offenses. If the above is the case, we have a much better chance against FAU than we did Toledo. Might be more like playing Western or even Ohio, where we got in Rourke's head, early. We do not have to shut down the run, just stop it enough to force 3rd downs. Back to bend but don't break.

Yep. Z.I.P. said he contacted the bowl, and I did the same. In fact, I just got back a message from someone saying that it should have been approved by licensing, and they are going to tell them to take down that image. EDIT: Ok, I see that they've already changed it.

Warren's unfortunate injury is only thing that kept me, Zipmlady, zipsoutsider and Balsy from correctly guessing all questions.

He wrestled the bear for an HOUR. And he was called "NFL's Strongest Man". He was quite a character.

I'm proud to say I went 0/4. I'll take an 0-fer every time if it leads to a MAC Championship appearance and a bowl game.

Check the thread. I did not post that article, though I most certainly would have. Eric Wynalda for USSF president!