As news about a football player boycott at Minnesota broke, Northern Illinois athletic director Sean Frazier quickly realized his Huskies might have a chance to play in the Holiday Bowl.
One problem: NIU was already on winter break.
But in less than 24 hours of frantic work, Frazier and NIU coaches knew they had what they needed most to accept a postseason bid on short notice: a motivated team.
With the Huskies having played in San Diego bowl games two of the last three seasons Frazier knew the logistics would fall into place for a game against Washington State on Dec. 27. Easy? No. But far from impossible.
“Because we’ve had a relationship with (Holiday Bowl organizers), we felt this was necessary to support the bowl and support our student athletes,” Frazier told The Associated Press on Saturday in a phone interview. “That was a major part of this. This bowl committee, which had been so nice to us, friends to us, that we would get ourselves together and mobilize.”