Looking ahead to the weekend: Bowl Season is upon us

As we roll into this weekend's huge matchup against the Eagles, the always interesting college football bowl season is officially upon us.  One reason it's important is that we get a chance to focus in on some of the top players in the country in their last game before the draft season begins.  Aside from some of the All-Star games, this is the last opportunity before the draft to see them in a true football environment.  After all, the combine and campus workouts can only show so much.

Up until now, the extent of our offseason discussions (most notably the draft) has been focused in the FanPost threads Drew K has been putting together (click here for the most recent).  Tomorrow we begin a slow transition to the offseason in our draft discussion.  I've spoken with Drew, and starting tomorrow he will be taking his draft analysis to another level.  Since we'll have bowl games for the next three weeks, it's only fitting that we have game threads for discussion of the games, and more importantly, discussion of the names to know from each game.  In past years we've done this on a limited basis.  Well, after his impressive work with the Offseason Discussion threads, I asked Drew K to take charge of the game threads for the bowl games.

The plan right now is up until New Years' Eve we'll have a single front page thread on a given day where you can discuss those particular bowl games.  For example, tomorrow Drew is posting a thread for discussion of the New Mexico Bowl and the St. Petersburg Bowl.  In that thread, Drew will provide some background on the game and the opponents, but more importantly he'll provide names and info on key players from each team.  This will help folks focus in on potentially draft-able players.  Obviously this won't cover everybody since people often come out of nowhere and really help their draft stock.  However, it does give us a good starting point.

Once we get to the New Years' Eve we'll probably do 2 threads each for December 31, January 1 and January 2 since there are five games each day.  Starting tomorrow, aside from discussing the games, if you have a suggestion to improve the threads, please feel free to include the suggestion in the comments.  This is a work in progress since we haven't done anything with this much detail to date.  I've had a chance to check out what Drew has in store for tomorrow, and I think people will find it very useful.