Wyoming won’t know who it’s playing until Sunday

Steve Guiremand

Wednesday, Dec. 1, 2004 | 10:02 a.m.

Just a little more than three weeks before kickoff, Las Vegas Bowl executive director Tina Kunzer-Murphy finally has a team to promote for the nationally televised Dec. 23 matchup at Sam Boyd Stadium.

Now comes the tough part: Who will oppose the Wyoming Cowboys (6-5) that night on ESPN?

Kunzer-Murphy will have to wait until Sunday morning when the final Bowl Championship standings are released before she can get an answer to that.

"The good news is we've got one side of it filled," Kunzer-Murphy said. "The bad news is we don't know who the other team will be."

Barring a UCLA upset of USC, a Southern Miss upset of Cal or a surprise shakeup in the final BCS standings, the Pac-10 Conference likely won't have enough bowl-eligible teams to fill its Las Vegas Bowl spot.

So that means Kunzer-Murphy could be forced to try to bring in an at-large team from a thin pool of candidates that could include Fresno State, which may be stuck with another Silicon Valley Classic trip unless the WAC can work out a trade with the Las Vegas Bowl, Syracuse or the Trojans.

No, not the No. 1-ranked USC Trojans. How about the Sun Belt Conference runner-up Troy State Trojans?

"Right now there are 56 teams available for 56 (bowl) slots," Kunzer-Murphy. "A lot of bowls are locking in the at-large teams but we can't do anything until Sunday because of the possibility the Pac-10 could still send us a team."

Troy State coach Larry Blakeney has called Kunzer-Murphy to lobby for his team. The Trojans (7-4) finished second to North Texas in the Sun Belt but scored impressive nonconference wins against Marshall (17-15) and Missouri (24-14) and had narrow losses to both LSU (24-20) and South Carolina (17-7).

Troy State vs. Wyoming. Can you say "yee-hah?"

The Cowboys, who haven't played in a bowl game since the 1993 Copper Bowl in Tucson, are estatic to be playing in Las Vegas no matter who the opponent is.

"We hit the jackpot," energetic head coach Joe Glenn said. "We are really excited about going to the Las Vegas Bowl. It's a tremendous reward for the season we had. To a man and to a fan, we're excited about going to Las Vegas and playing Dec. 23."