Pinstripe still a southward bowl game, barely

This line from a rundown of bowl game watchability got me thinking.

Most bowl games feature teams that got to go to a cool place. This does not—the game is played in Navy’s home stadium in Annapolis, and Virginia isn’t even leaving the DMV. (If you have to travel north to a bowl game, it’s typically a bad sign.)

Iowa’s going to the Pinstripe Bowl this year, and Iowa State went in 2011. That’s not a warm place, but is it traveling north? Then I realized I had already made the map for this.

The map overlays the southern New England states and nearby points over a map of Iowa on the same latitudes. New York City, moved 21 degrees of longitude westward, sits on top of eastern Page County. Yankee Stadium (strictly speaking, Old Yankee Stadium) is on the Taylor/Page county line northeast of Clarinda. Boston College, Iowa’s bowl opponent, is four miles from Fenway Park — or on this map, two miles northeast of La Porte City.

Reversing the transposition, the ISU campus is on I-91 at the Connecticut/Massachusetts state line, and Iowa’s campus overlays Otis Air National Guard Base on the western end of the Cape Cod peninsula.

What about the other northern bowl sites?

• The 49ers’ new stadium is in Santa Clara, on the south side of San Francisco Bay, so it’s south of the entire state of Iowa.
• The Detroit Lions’ stadium, moved 10 degrees of longitude westward, is on IA 175 between Eldora and Grundy Center. Michigan State, Wisconsin, and Minnesota are the only Big Ten teams that would not travel north if they were banished to that bowl. (Michigan and Northwestern are a wash.)
• The winner, of course, is the Humanitarian Famous Idaho Potato Bowl in Boise. The Boise-Nampa metro sits in the latitude area between the Iowa/Minnesota state line and I-90 west of Austin.

After those five bowls, the next-northernmost are the Music City and Las Vegas in a virtual tie, followed by the Belk and Liberty, again in a virtual tie. All those are south of 36°30′ latitude — the Missouri Compromise line. The next College Football Playoff champion will come from below that line too, just like every other champion since 1997 except Ohio State.