Wanna see P.J. Fleck covered in mayonnaise?
It could happen.
That’s because the Gopher football team is headed to Charlotte, NC for the Jan. 3 Duke’s Mayo Bowl to take on Virginia Tech.
The winning coach, instead of getting doused with Gatorade, sits on a chair while the a giant container of the stuff is tipped and white goo comes cascading down on top of his head.
Sure, it’s kinda goofy.
But, when you have a college football game in a mid-Atlantic climate after the biggest matchups of the postseason have already been played, you need a gimmick.
"It's a great tradition," Fleck said Sunday after the selection process wrapped up. "This is what college football is all about."
Does anyone know the postgame tradition of the Cotton Bowl?
"You have a little bit of these quirks that come out based on who's sponsoring it," he said. "I think it's tremendous. If we're lucky enough and fortunate enough to win the football game, absolutely. Make it double."
The Gophers, who started out the season with a bad loss to North Carolina and lost two in a row before the calendar turned to October, are headed to their sixth bowl game since Fleck was plucked from Western Michigan to replace Tracy Claeys.
They’ve won every one of the previous five (and, yes, last season’s bowl game in Detroit counts).
The Gophers’ season turned around with consecutive wins over Big Ten newcomers Southern Cal and UCLA, was nearly derailed by back-to-back losses to Rutgers (really?) and Penn State before the exclamation point win at Wisconsin.
The Gophers (7-5) and Hokies (6-6) have only one common opponent.
Both lost to Rutgers (them again), who plays Kansas State in the Rate Bowl.
This will be the first time the Gophers and Virginia Tech have squared off on the football field.
One thing the Gophers don’t want to do is drop the Duke's Mayo Bowl trophy, which shattered when exactly that happened in 2020.
It was dropped by the quarterback of Wisconsin.
Figures.
WCCO's Al Schoch has attended the Gator, Independence, Orange, and Sugar Bowls. He's never had a giant jar of mayonnaise dumped on his head, not even in New Orleans (that wasn't mayo).