Maryland senior center Edwin Williams doesn’t think his team’s season has been flushed away.
“There is no such thing as a bad bowl: The only bad bowl is a toilet bowl,” he said. “There are a lot of teams that would kill right now to be 7-4.”
Maryland (7-4 overall, 4-3 ACC), a week after being eliminated from Atlantic Coast Conference title game contention, can improve its chances of playing in a second-tier bowl game with a win at No. 20 Boston College (8-3, 4-3) on Saturday afternoon at 3:30.
“The goal now is to be 8-4 at the end of the season,” Williams said, “and see what happens from there.”
Maryland is looking at the potential of a second straight trip to the Emerald Bowl in San Francisco, or an invitation to the Meineke Car Care Bowl (Charlotte, N.C.) or Gaylord Hotels Music City Bowl (Nashville, Tenn.) — the three bowls that are the destinations for the conference’s fifth through seventh-place teams.
Maryland, however, would be considered by the Champs Sports Bowl in Orlando should it defeat Boston College convincingly. The Champs Sports Bowl, which pays its participants $2.25 million, gets the fourth pick after the Orange Bowl, Chick-fil-A Bowl and Gator Bowl, which has the third choice.
“The better record you have, the more bowls are going to look at you,” senior defensive lineman Jeremy Navarre said. “I think that’s our goal right now — to get this win and have as many possibilities open to us.”
But if Maryland loses to Boston College for the second straight season, it could be headed for one of the two least prestigious bowls with ties to the ACC: the Roady’s Humanitarian Bowl in Boise, Idaho, and the EagleBank Bowl in Washington D.C.’s RFK Stadium, where it would play Navy (6-4) on Dec. 20.
“Somewhere warmer than colder, how about that?” senior linebacker Moise Fokou said. “I’ll leave it at that.”
