Both teams hail from the Mountain West, with Nevada sitting at 6-6 and Colorado State at 7-5. It's an intriguing matchup and the two sides hadn't encountered one another this year, but conference commissioner Craig Thompson stood as one of the biggest opponents to the pairing in a statement released on TheMW.com:
It is a travesty the Mountain West has been forced into this situation. Clearly, the system is broken. There is an excess of bowl games due in part to a disparate allocation of openings vs. conference bowl histories. The result is teams with sub-.