Wake Forest, Navy kick off bowl season

Pull up an easy chair and get ready to be bowled over because college football’s postseason is about to start.

A record 34 games are on tap, kicking off with four Saturday and culminating with the BCS title game Jan. 8 in Miami between Oklahoma and Florida.

Bowl season will begin with a game matching teams that are meeting for the second time in less than three months (Wake Forest and Navy) and end with a title contest between teams that have combined for 2,219 games without meeting.

The quartet of contests to start the postseason will come only two weeks after the regular season ended for some teams.

New bowls in Washington, D.C., and St. Petersburg, Fla., are among those featured Saturday.

Navy and Wake meet in the EagleBank Bowl in Washington, a rematch of their Sept. 27 game in Winston-Salem, N.C., won by the Midshipmen 24-17.

Wake Forest is making a third consecutive bowl appearance, a first for the school.

“We know what they’re going to do and that’s run the ball, so we’ll need to try and stop that,” Demon Deacons linebacker Stanley Arnoux said this week. “But I think we need to execute better this time because we didn’t do that very well in any aspect of the game last time we played them.”

Saturday’s inaugural St. Petersburg Bowl will feature South Florida and Memphis.

Also on the schedule Saturday: the New Mexico Bowl in Albuquerque between Colorado State and Fresno State and the Las Vegas Bowl, matching Arizona and 16th-ranked Brigham Young.

There is also a game Sunday, the New Orleans bowl between Troy and Southern Mississippi.

With 68 teams participating in bowls, nine will carry 6-6 records, the NCAA minimum requirement, into the postseason.