Duke's Mayo Bowl
MADISON, WI (WSAU) — The Wisconsin Badgers are going bowling in 2020 after all.
Fresh off their overtime win over Minnesota, the Badgers announced they have accepted an invitation to the Duke’s Mayo Bowl in Charlotte, NC where they will take on Wake Forest University on December 30th at 11 AM.
This will mark the 19th straight bowl appearance for Wisconsin, the 3rd-longest such streak in the country. Wisconsin was tied with Boise State, but the Broncos opted-out of the 2020 Bowl Season following their loss to San Jose State in the Mountain West Championship game.
The game will mark the first-ever meeting between Wisconsin and Wake Forest on the football field.
Tickets and travel packages for the game will not be sold through the University of Wisconsin athletic office. The game will sell a limited number of tickets that can be purchased directly through Ticketmaster.
A total of 28 bowl games have been scheduled beginning on December 21st with the inaugural Myrtle Beach Bowl. Fifteen games were either canceled or postponed due to COVID-19.
Perhaps the biggest snub of the Bowl Season was a nine-win Army team being left out of the mix after they accepted a bid to the Independence Bowl at the midway point of the season. West Point was slated to play a PAC-12 opponent, but that conference announced they would send just two schools to Bowl Games (Oregon and Colorado). Then due to scheduling agreements between other conferences and their bowl partners, some games were forced to take sub-.500 teams instead of giving a wild card bid to Army, according to Stadium’s Brett McMurphy.
Nationally traditional powers such as the University of Southern California, Utah, and Pitt also chose to give their student-athletes the holiday off due to concerns about COVID-19 or in order to allow them to travel to see family for Christmas and other holidays. Virginia Tech also opted-out early in the process, ending the nation’s longest active Bowl Game streak at 27 games dating back to the 1993 Independence Bowl.
In what is yet another sign of just how wild 2020 has been, at one point this weekend it was reported that the Sun Belt Conference and BYU were negotiating to have the Cougars play two different SBC teams in two different bowls. Those discussions never came to fruition.
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