Boxing Day Sips, featuring bowl momentum

Hope y'all had Merry Xmases, guys! We had this fun little dead period with basketball once again on a week-plus break and football chilling out until they head to Jacksonville. (I, too, would wait until the last possible minute before going to Jacksonville.) But that all ended today with the team sending out about a million tweets about their bowl flight, so yeah! Let's look at some stuff scrounged up over the past few days:

Now that's dedication, homes: Teddy Greenstein had this nice feature on the man who has been to all nine Northwestern bowl losses since 1996. DON'T GO TO JACKSONVILLE, BRO.

Atlantic Ocean the posts?: The ocean is near Jacksonville, right? Regardless, LTP had a nice story on whether bowl momentum is real today. Summary: it makes a huge difference for the preseason top 25, which in turn sort of indicates how the final 25 could turn out, but doesn't have a huge effect. It makes sense that teams that win bowls could have a dropoff the next year, but it also makes sense that if you're good enough to win a bowl game one year, you'll be good the next. The point is: we're in a bowl game, and we've seen pretty much every possible effect of losing bowl games, so let's not?

Fitzflash: The guys over at Inside NU probably just took that awful, awful, awful, hellacious Medill course where you have to learn how to do stuff in Flash, and as a result, they made this nice graphic that lets you scroll through all of Pat Fitzgerald's wins, season by season. It's fun, especially if you remember most of them. I appreciate that they made at least 49 frames of stuff, too.