The 14th-ranked Hutchinson Community College football team will play host to No. 19 Lackawanna College in the third-annual Salt City Bowl.
Blue Dragon football head coach Rion Rhoades and the Salt City Bowl committee made the announcement on Tuesday, the day when all NJCAA bowl matchups are announced.
“The bowl committee had a lot of options this year,” Rhoades said. “That says a lot about the game itself because we had interest from all over the country.”
The 2011 Salt City Bowl will kick off at 1:07 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 3 at Gowans Stadium. The game will be televised live for the second-straight season by Cox Kansas channel 22. It will be the third time this season that the Blue Dragons have been on statewide television.
Ticket information for the Salt City Bowl will be announced at a later date.
The Blue Dragons are 8-3 and finished second in the Jayhawk Conference and were Region VI runner-up for the third time in four seasons. HCC lost to Butler twice this season and was upset on the road at Air Force Prep on 9/11 Weekend.
The 19th-ranked Lackawanna Falcons are 7-3, coming off an impressive 44-24 neutral site victory over Georgia Military on Sunday. The Falcons are 5-1 in road games this season and only 1-2 at home. The Falcons went 3-3 in conference play with losses to Louisburg College, Nassau and Dean College.
Lackawanna is a school of 1,260 full-time students located in Scranton, Pa.
“They are a very strong team,” Rhodes said of Lackawanna. “They are consistently good in their conference. They have sent a lot of players to Division I schools, so they have a lot of tradition.”
This will be the third time that the Blue Dragons will play a team from the Northeast Conference in a bowl game. The Blue Dragons played Northeast Conference teams in back-to-back Sterling Silver Bowls in Sterling, Kan. HCC defeated Nassau 32-7 in 1969 to complete an undefeated season. The Dragons then tied Dover College from Delaware 8-8 in 1970.
Those bowl games are the only games in which the Dragons played a team from the Northeast Conference.
Hutchinson will be making its third-straight and 16th bowl appearance overall.
The Blue Dragons are currently on a program-best three-game bowl winning streak. HCC defeated Eastern Arizona College 42-21 last season in the Salt City Bowl. The Dragons defeated New Mexico Military Institute 22-14 in the inaugural Salt City Bowl in 2009. Hutch defeated Tyler 15-10 in the 2004 Heart of Texas Bowl.
Hutchinson has played in eight different bowl games.
Lackawanna will be playing in its ninth bowl game and first against a Jayhawk Conference team. The Falcons are 3-5 in their first eight bowl goal games. Lackawanna last appeared in a bowl game last season in the Graphic Edge Bowl and defeated Ellsworth 34-20.
The Salt City bowl will be Lackawanna’s eighth different bowl game in its history.
Hutchinson will be one of two Jayhawk Conference teams competing in 2011 bowl games. Butler will play at Trinity Valley in the Citizen’s Bank Bowl on Dec. 4 in Pittsburg.
(By Steve Carpenter, HCC Sports Information Director)