If I could, I’d give the Hilltoppers bowl bid to UAB

By Fletcher Keel | Dec 3, 2014

If a month ago you told me this Hilltoppers team would be in a bowl game, I would have slapped you silly. I would have loved to hear the news, but I also wouldn’t have appreciated you lying right to my face about the fact that finally, after a fourth straight year of bowl eligibility, the Tops would be playing past their regularly scheduled date.

The Hilltoppers have also played the best they have in quite sometime over the past month of games, running through a three game home stretch over UTEP, Army and UTSA and shocking the mid-major football landscape and making history, becoming the first team in WKU history to defeat a Top 25 team, and ensuring themselves a bowl bid, by finishing 7-5. There are a handful of other teams who are bowl eligible, but Conference USA stands up for those who have proven themselves, and tries to get the teams with seven-plus wins in a bowl game before worrying about those who are right at the six win plateau.

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A magical season for Jeff Brohm and the Tops’ in their first year of C-USA, and if I ran the world, I’d make it just a little more magical by doing one more thing – I would give the bowl game the Hilltoppers will be announced to on Sunday to UAB.

Why, you may ask? I will answer your question with another question – why not?

UAB – head coach Bill Clark, the 19 seniors, the students and alumni – deserve one more chance. A true going-out party.

Nov 29, 2014; Hattiesburg, MS, USA; UAB Blazers head coach Bill Clark talks to an official in the second half against the Southern Miss Golden Eagles at M.M. Roberts Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Chuck Cook-USA TODAY Sports

The fans need to show up in the thousands, and show the Alabama Board of Trustee’s that they’re doing something that doesn’t just affect a handful of people from August to November. It affects everything that the university will do – or what they’ll be limited to do – and it’s going to upset a lot, and I mean a lot of the school’s alumni.

The Tops are a new kid on the block. UAB is a founding institution of Conference USA. Unless things change – either all this surrounding the program and it stays or the bylaws of the conference – this year will be their final lap in something they helped build.

Its the right thing to do, and it would mean the world to a school in a football-crazy state. They may never see the green and gold take a gridiron again. Why not be the ones who help them do it one final time?

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