FAU_dad

Tough game for the Zips - while FAU spun our wheels to get going through the majority of the 1st quarter, you guys just never did anything offensively. After you got down I would have expected to see some semblance of urgency, you guys going for 4th downs, etc. I kind of expected our offense to wear your guys down with speed and tempo, but I really can't figure out if our D played lights out or if your O was just really bad tonight (I will probably go with a little of both)? Even as an FAU fan, I was not big on going for 2, but right or wrong Kiffin is trying to draw attention to garner additional top-25 votes. I do hope your team and the fans have safe travels back, and best of luck next season.

After things went a little sideways, I refrained from posting - your board, so I was on here mainly to learn some stuff and provide you guys some details. I hope that everybody who made the trip enjoys their time in Boca, and I hope for a clean and injury-free game. I am heading to the stadium now. As for the buyout, we already had a buyout clause on him what would have practically given us Kiffin's services for "free" if he left during the first 2 years. I certainly haven't seen the details of this, but my guess is the length of the contract is specifically to balloon that buyout figure. G5 programs should understand this is where we are at - we either get coaches on the back-half of their careers and hope they are good ones (like you guys with Bowden and Amato), or we get guys who are rising up and using us as stepping stones. FAU has gone all-in on embracing the success for as long as it lasts, and the buyout will be what is used to bridge the gap into hiring the next guy. That is a different place from where the program has ever been, and is primarily driven by our President who gets that football can be good for the school (he is a former Clemson guy). Sorry - bit of a ramble. Hope you guys have a good holiday season and I'll be back to either wish you luck going forward if FAU wins or to congratulate you if we don't.

You guys beat Buffalo by 1 point and we lost by 3. Anybody here going to give me FAU and 4 points? I agree that the whole strength of schedule thing is impossible because neither side knows how good (or bad) the other conference is. Akron fans - as they should - think the MAC is good. FAU fans think our conference is as good or better. I am not sure either team would be eyeing a move to the other's conference (except for maybe enjoying the Southern weather). But I know none of us really know which conference is better top-to-bottom. I am not trying to rationalize our season. We won 10 games and a conference championship and are in a bowl where we are predicted to win. If Akron were to win you will get to 8 wins and can easily claim that the MAC is better (especially if Ohio beats UAB which I am picking in our pool). If you were to lose you'll be the MAC runner-up and have a .500 record. In reality, if we were playing Toledo, and UNT was playing you guys, and on down the line then and only then would we really know about the conferences. In the end, the only match-ups and performance that matter are the ones next Tuesday because for these 2 teams it is now just about the Boca Bowl.

Yep - Buffalo was no doubt way better than Wisconsin!!!

Another C-USA team who finished well behind us is playing FSU - so hard to understand why you think it was far-fetched. It could easily have been Southern Miss vs Akron in Boca and us in the Independence Bowl.

I've seen some of the way too ahead of ourselves comments, but again most projections FAU saw had USF and then a few had FSU as our bowl opponent. And I absolutely wished we would have played either (or both) FSU and Florida this year. Put that in perspective, if Ohio State was having an awful season and Akron was having the best season in school history, wouldn't you want to play them? Even playing a tightly contested game you end up losing can do wonders for your program against the big boys from where you recruit. And most FAU fans readily-admit we have been bad for a decade or more. That's why this season, Kiffin and the staff, and the players we have coming back have FAU fans overly excited.

Today it only got to around a "frigid" 67 degrees in Boca. Starting this weekend, the daily highs should be between 78 and 82 and the lows in the upper 60s through the game on Tuesday. To be fair, it is going to be partly cloudy

Just sharing - FAU has beer in the stadium. We also have an open-air full bar area, but that is on the West (home) side and you are "supposed" to have seats in sections 203-207 to be able to enjoy that (the stadium staff has not always been the best at enforcing that, though). If you look at an image of the stadium seating chart, the bar is the open area you can see between the lower and upper parts of those sections. But there are vendors for beer all over the place - several walking around selling. I haven't paid a whole lot of attention to all the beers that are offered, but do know that they are generally $8 for a 16-ounce bottle. Also, parking will be $20 and is first-come, first-serve in all of the lots assuming it is run like the C-USA championship game. FAU has nothing to do with the costs - all of that is set by the C-USA for the last game and the Boca Bowl for this one. Just in case anybody is coming to the game and wondering.

I also was interested in this. I lived in Raleigh, NC for a number of years while Amato was the coach at NC State. He was a player's favorite and usually had some colorful and amusing interviews. But of course I am just as curious to see what he says about the game. And of course Bowden is always a very good interview.

Good to have some back and forth. Honestly I don't know how the past performance and lack of success by FAU (or Akron) or games being referenced from previous seasons have anything to do with this year. Buffalo was probably an outlier of not a very good performance by both teams given the games were close. The MAC has 5 teams with 7 or more wins out of 12 teams, CUSA had 6 out of 14. The MAC had 7 bowl-eligible (6 got in) and CUSA had 10 (9 got in). I'd say both teams and conferences are probably better than John Q Public will ever give us credit for because of the conferences we play in and the football history at each place. Those kind of stats tell us that we have played some pretty decent teams, and the difference will be who can set the tone of the game. FAU thinks it will be us because of the tempo we run on offense. But like many have said, we will see.

Could be - we certainly left 10 or more points on the field in the first quarter with multiple redzone trips, but we still were up 34-0 before we kind of just coasted (similar to what I saw in your championship game with Toledo when they got up really big on you guys). For those who supposedly know what they are talking about and set odds and point spreads, in the Toledo game you were 20.5 point underdogs. In the FAU game you are 22.5 point underdogs (by far the biggest spread of any bowl game). So it would seem Vegas thinks FAU is as good or slightly better than Toledo at least against the Zips. And if you look at the coach's poll, FAU has 24 votes, Toledo has 21, and Troy has 11. I never read too much into that poll, but it at least shows we are considered at least equal to those teams. There are replays of many of our games on Facebook or the Stadium Network, but the only one you can see on the Watch ESPN app is the CUSA Championship. Here are the highlights from the first time we played North Texas - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37wAj6-4k5Q&feature=onebox. We had 55 points in the 3rd quarter, and they scored 2 fourth quarter TDs including their last one with about 30 seconds left in the game. Some of the guys you will see running or catching passes in this highlight did not play in the championship game, but will be back for the bowl.

Don't get me wrong @zipsoutsider - I watched parts of your games against Toledo, Kent State, and Ohio (ESPN replays). If FAU plays the way they have played most of the past 10 weeks I think our offensive weapons and overall speed will be too much and it will be a 3-score type of spread. We have 5 or more guys who hurt teams running the ball (2 RBs but then the QB, WRs on jet-sweeps or reverses, etc.). And then when teams load the box we throw it over the top or trick them with something. We have a defense who has given up some yardage and points, but come up with big plays (sacks and turnovers). If you guys are not an elite MAC team, I can tell you for a fact at least for this season FAU is head-and-shoulders the best team in CUSA. But that is why we play the games - nobody wins on stats or what they have done (or haven't done) in past weeks. It all matters about who shows up on the 19th. And just like any game, big plays and turnovers can always make a difference.

Question #1 I think is he will be here. Kiffin really seems to enjoy the current freedom he has, and most think it will have to be a big time job to pull him away. He will be picky, but so will those schools. None of the jobs this year were realistic from both sides - the jobs he'll want still want to see what he does for another year or maybe more. No idea on #2, but it isn't good. We were on the Stadium network, and the quality of the broadcasts were good but are not nearly as readily available as say ESPN3. If CUSA wants to get seen we need to do something different.

I'm new to supporting FAU, so trying to be realistic I would agree some of the fans have gotten a little ahead of themselves. However, this has been a record-breaking, best season in school history. All of the struggles were early on, and I would guess if FAU was playing Buffalo again we would be a similar roughly 23 point favorite to what we are against you guys. I would also guess if we played Navy again we would be favored and would win that game (terrible first game matchup for a new staff with some players who were on the field who just got on campus literally a week before). Easy to say, but if this team and staff had time together before the season we might be 11-2 or possibly 12-1. This is what is great about bowls where teams and conferences really don't know one another. CUSA has teams that are not well known, but we had 10 teams that were bowl-eligible and 9 that made it in. Our schedule included games against 9 bowl-eligible teams (8 that are playing and 10 games against bowl teams with the second game with North Texas). None of that matters, as "any given Saturday" a team can lose. And a huge point-spread and playing at home can lead to a team not getting up for the game. But I will be optimistic that the team keeps surprising me in how ready they seem since about the 5th game of the season. We have a significant amount of the team coming back plus a few transfers who are sitting out this year, so if we have 10+ wins again in 2018 then I'll start thinking we really have something going. Right now we are a hot team who wants to become a good program and after several mediocre to bad season's Owl fans are very happy about that.

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.

Not sure how to interpret that. You guys seemed to win that game on offense (most points you scored all season other than AR-Pine Bluff) and winning the TO battle 3-0. Rourke averaged 11 yards per carry, had 165 yards rushing, and ran for 2 TDs (and caught 1). I know 68 came on the one TD, but that is still 97 yards on his other 14 carries (over 6.9 YPC). If Singletary averages 11 (or even 7) YPC it will be a very long game, because he will carry it 25+ times. And the trick play with the reverse and throwback to the QB for a TD by Ohio - expect to see at least 4 or 5 (maybe more with 2+ weeks prep) of those kinds of plays from FAU. They may not work, but when they have they have been game-changers and typically long TDs (we don't do those in the redzone - we do them out in the middle of the field). And regarding your redzone defense - we have not been a great TD-scoring redzone offense. We have 44 TDs on 59 trips (75%). But on the year we have 68 TDs - so we have scored from outside the redzone 24 times (almost 2 per game). That is kind of crazy, but there are several "homerun hitters" on this team. But this is what is great about a bowl game like these. Teams step way outside their conferences and play against teams that they don't know about and nobody really knows what the game will look like until the guys are on the field. We have just been way faster and more athletic than anybody we have played in CUSA, but that is all we have played for the past 10 weeks.

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.

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 would think so. The pecking order for AAC would usually be something like Liberty -> Birmingham -> St. Pete -> Boca (they have others, just using the ones I know). When UCF got a New Year's game in the Peach, Memphis went "up" to Liberty, USF to Birmingham, etc. The Boca Bowl tie-ins are CUSA and AAC.

It really is funny for us - the Boca Bowl has a lower payout (I actually think it is $400k) than if we went to St. Pete, but of course we would have had some expenses if we went to any other location. For the 3rd year in a row, the CUSA champion is playing in Boca, but there was this idea that the team should be rewarded with more of a "bowl experience" for having the best season in the history of the program and as outright conference champions we got to pick the bowl - if that were true we would be heading to St. Pete for a weekend game rather than a Tuesday night. CUSA bowl tie-ins: Boca St. Pete New Orleans Bahamas New Mexico Heart of Dallas Secondary to Independence (much higher payout) I can tell you as a transplant from NC you will love the weather. FAU also has a very pretty stadium, nice campus (most buildings are new), a view of the Atlantic from our pressbox, and a ton of shopping, restaurants, etc. All of that relatively close to West Palm, Fort Lauderdale, or Miami if you want to venture out. I live in Orlando, and it is about a 3-hour drive from my house (less from the amusement parks) if you make a longer stay out of the trip.

Chiming-in as an FAU fan - feel free to ask questions if you want. The general disappointment from our fan base was not that we expected some huge bowl, but we had been projected for much of the last 4 or 5 weeks to play in probably the St. Pete bowl against USF or an outside chance to play in the Independence Bowl against FSU. Both the St. Pete and Boca Bowls are supposed to be CUSA and AAC teams, so the most likely destination for us was going to be St. Pete because our own administration is on record saying playing in Boca would be a last choice regardless of opponent. Playing FSU or USF no doubt was our dream scenario given 95% of our players come from the state of FL. Earlier in the day yesterday it was reported by credible sources (Brett McMurphy and other sites) that we were going to be in the Boca Bowl against Temple (AAC). That was already being seen as a bit of a letdown, to stay at home but then that went away in a last-minute deal and Akron is the opponent. Now all either side can do is get ready to showcase themselves as the only game on ESPN that day. Safe travels for anybody who comes down.