PITT to play Kentucky in the "Why couldn't this be for the basketball National Championship bowl"

According to a close source (my girlfriend), the Panthers will play the Kentucky Wildcats in the BBVA Compass bowl on January 8th in Birmingham, Alabama.

Believe it or not, when I heard this news, I was kind of happy. But not the happy that you're thinking of. I'll give you an analogy:

This Tuesday, I have a dental appointment, and I'm going to find out if I need a root canal or if there is no hope for my damaged tooth and it'll have to be extracted.

I'm hoping for the root canal.

The BBVA Compass bowl (formally the Papa Johns bowl) against Kentucky might not seem like much, but in this analogy, it's the root canal to the painful and bloody extraction that would be the Beef'O Brady Bowl against Southern Miss on December 21st.

At least it's against an SEC team. Sure, maybe not a sexy SEC team, but if PITT pulls the game out, Big East fans will use it to totally talk trash and rip the SEC on blogs and message boards. And at the end of the day, that's really all that matters.