Last year, the New Era Pinstripe Bowl was one of the best bowl games of the year. This year, those at Yankee Stadium are going to hope to have just as good of a game when the Iowa State Cyclones take on the Rutgers Scarlet Knights.
Iowa State really came on strong with a slew of victories on the NCAA football betting odds. The Cyclones covered five of their last six games, and they won the games that they needed to win to make it to a bowl game. Remember that this is a team that just barely beat the Northern Iowa Panthers and the Iowa Hawkeyes at the start of the year, and the only game that was won by more than four points was a victory on the road at the Texas Tech Red Raiders a week after the boys from Lubbock beat the Oklahoma Sooners.
It was the defense that really came up strong for the Cyclones. Yes, the unit allowed 87 points in these last three games of the year, but those games came against the Oklahoma State Cowboys, Oklahoma Sooners, and Kansas State Wildcats, all three of which were being considered for the BCS up until the last Saturday of the college football betting season.
Rutgers wasn't all that far out of the BCS this year either. The team only finished a game back of the Big East title, and the loss on the road at the Connecticut Huskies in the last game of the year may have kept the Scarlet Knights out of the BCS. They still have never made it to the big time bowl games in spite of the fact that they have taken a lot of steps in the right direction.
The quarterback situation and the running game for Rutgers are both a wreck. The combination of QBs Gary Nova and Chas Dodd isn't all that great, and there wasn't a rusher that carried the ball more than 20 times that averaged even four yards per carry.
That being said, WR Mohamed Sanu is going to be the most talented and diverse players in this game. Sanu caught 109 passes for 1,144 yards and seven TDs this year. Head Coach Greg Schiano puts the ball in Sanu's hands a ton, and he should have at least a dozen looks in this one as well.
The Scarlet Knights will probably have a bit of a home field advantage playing in the Big Apple, and they are probably going to be more used to the cold weather than Iowa State. That's why Rutgers is favored by a point and a half. The 'total' is up from 43 to 44.5 on the Pinstripe Bowl odds.
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