For all the pregame talk about Shonn Greene and two of the nation’s best defenses, the outcome of Thursday’s 23rd annual Outback Bowl is going to come down to the relative efficiency of two young quarterbacks.

South Carolina’s defense is good enough to contain, if not completely stop, Iowa’s ground game, led by Greene. And the Gamecocks really don’t have much of a ground attack. They finished last in the SEC in rushing yardage.

All of that points to a tight, low-scoring game that easily could pivot on an untimely turnover by Iowa’s Ricky Stanzi or Carolina’s Stephen Garcia.

Stanzi will have some openings because the Gamecocks are going to load up in an effort to become the first team to hold Greene under 100 yards. If Stanzi can capitalize on those opportunities, South Carolina is in trouble. I could see Andy Brodell, whose best game ever came in the 2006 Alamo Bowl, catching a couple of deep balls on play-action passes.

Garcia, a redshirt freshman who has made only two career starts, is the biggest X factor in this game. He is, by all accounts, immensely talented as both a runner and passer but often forgets assignments, freelances, grows impatient for plays to develop or all of the above. He has taken almost every snap in practice since the regular season ended 4½ weeks ago and should be more mentally prepared than ever before. He could hurt the Hawkeyes as much with his feet as his arm.

While many Iowa fans believe their team will win easily, the only way that happens is if South Carolina helps them out with a slew of turnovers. The current Vegas point spread of four points looks pretty accurate to me.

Prediction: Iowa 17, South Carolina 13

As so often happens at this time of year, Kirk Ferentz’s name has begun to pop up in connection with coaching vacancies in the National Football League.

The New York Jets, Denver Broncos, Detroit Lions and Cleveland Browns all have fired their head coaches within the last few days and Ferentz has been linked with the Cleveland situation in reports by both ESPN and the Boston Herald.

Ferentz, of course, is downplaying the whole thing. But he’s also not completely dismissing the reports. Scott Pioli, a close friends of his from his days as a line coach in the NFL, reportedly could be named the new general manager in Cleveland and speculation is rampant that Ferentz would be his choice to be the coach.

Ferentz’s message in a Wednesday morning news conference basically was: Don’t believe everything you hear.

So much for all that talk about the economy making it impossible for some Iowa fans to make their annual bowl trip. I’ve been to a dozen other Iowa bowl games through the year and there seems to be as many bumble bees here as ever.

They greatly outnumbered the South Carolina fans at the bowl beach party on Tuesday. There were about 9,000 of them at the Tuesday night Hawkeye Huddle. Maybe they were all the same people that were at the beach but since the two events were 25 miles and only a few hours apart, that’s doubtful.
Word has it that Iowa fans also have pretty much commandeered a couple of drinking establishments in the Channelside area.

Someone speculated that maybe all the South Carolina fans will be arriving later since it’s a fairly easy one-day drive down here for most of them. I’m betting they’re still outnumbered and out-cheered Thursday morning in Raymond James Stadium.

At the big pre-bowl luncheon on Monday, I had the pleasure of sitting next to long-time Cedar Rapids area broadcaster Bob Brooks, who is here covering his 21st Iowa bowl trip. The only two bowl games in Iowa history that Brooksie missed were the 1983 Gator Bowl and the 1995 Sun Bowl, both times because he was off covering the Iowa basketball team instead.

We were talking about how everyone involved already seemed ready to dispense with all these preliminaries and get the game started. But he said it used to be even worse. He recalled that for the two 1950s era Rose Bowls in which Iowa played, the competing teams were contractually required to be at the bowl site for two weeks prior to the game.

“That was really terrible,’’ Brooks said. “It was too long. At the end of the first week, everyone was ready to play a game and we still had a whole week of this stuff to go.’’

Iowa’s workout facility here at the University of Tampa is a nice enough location. The field is good and it sits close to downtown, in the shadow of the city’s picturesque skyline.

But to get from the practice field to their dressing room in the Bob Martinez Sports Center, the players must trudge across a fairly busy street, North Boulevard. It was busier than ever when practice ended Monday at about 5:30 p.m. and they had a traffic cop out there stopping cars so the players could cross.

At one point, a car nearly disregarded the policeman’s signals and started into the intersection just as two Hawkeyes did. The driver stopped quickly, the players stepped back onto the curb and we can assume defensive coordinator Norm Parker breathed a large sigh of relief.

The two players were stalwart defensive tackles Mitch King and Matt Kroul.

It didn’t take long after arriving here in Tampa today to be reminded that I’m no longer in Iowa. As I was walking into a local restaurant in a decent neighborhood tonight, some scruffy-looking guy was perched in the doorway. He asked if I could give him some money for a meal. After being seated, I noticed that the large woman with the huge earings seated at the next table was speaking in a distinctly male voice.

Panhandlers. Cross-dressers. You can’t get this kind of stuff back home. It should be an interesting week.

To the surprise of no one, Iowa running back Shonn Greene has filed paperwork to receive opinions from NFL scouts on his draft prospects. He revealed that to reporters on Friday.

But Greene insisted that does not necessarily mean he is turning pro. He said he just wants to check out his options. You can hardly blame him for that. At 23, Greene is older than most college football players. If he has a chance to be a first- or second-round pick, he would be foolish to return to Iowa and risk diminishing his chances with an injury.

South Carolina also figures to have a few players turn pro before their eligibility in completed. Junior cornerback Captain Munnerlyn also revealed this week that he plans to check out his pro possibilities.
And, of course, junior safety Emmanuel Cook apparently stopped attending classes sometime during the fall semester with the intention of turning pro. He has been declared academically ineligible for Thursday’s Outback Bowl.

Every year during the week prior to the Rose Bowl, the two competing teams gather at a swanky restaurant and vie to see which one can consume more pounds of prime rib.

The Outback Bowl has a similar event although they don’t keep track of which team eats the most. However, Outback officials reported that at the annual Team Welcome Dinner on Friday night — at Outback Steakhouse, of course — the players from Iowa and South Carolina wolfed down “more than 5,500 pounds of food including: 750 pounds of steak, 750 pounds chicken, 900 poundsof ribs, 700 pounds of bleu cheese Wedge Salad, 200 pounds of green beans, 950 pounds of Bloomin Onions, pounds lbs of cheese cake, 85 gallons of barbecue sauce and 60 cases of soda and water.”

Some of those numbers seem a tad high. The Bloomin’ Onion number, for example, computes to about three pounds per player. These guys may be belching all the way up to game time.

We’ll also never know if the Iowa kids consumed more than their South Carolina counterparts — we’re betting they did — but Iowa already had a small victory of sorts earlier in the day when head coach Kirk Ferentz announced that it appears all his players are academically eligible to play in next Thursday’s game. South Carolina earlier declared that three of its players are ineligible, including All-SEC safety Emmanuel Cook.

Ticket sales for the Jan. 1 Outback Bowl have been labeled “disappointing,” but it hasn’t been all that bad on the Iowa side of things. The Hawkeyes traditionally bring 15,000-20,000 people to bowl games and they’ve sold about 13,000 tickets through the university’s ticket office. In view of the current economic conditions, that’s pretty good.

The same can not be said of South Carolina. It brought more than 20,000 people the two other times it played in the Outback Bowl (in 2001 and 2002), but this time it reportedly has sold only about 9,000 tickets. Each school is required to take an allotment of at least 11,000. It’s possible the Gamecocks could be forced to eat a few of those tickets.

It’s a fairly easy one-day drive to Tampa for most South Carolina fans while Iowa fans must either fly or spend two very long days in the family truckster. Then again, the other two times South Carolina was in the Outback, it had a pretty good team and was playing Ohio State. (It beat the Buckeyes both times.) This time, the Gamecocks are 7-5 and finished the regular season with two lopsided losses.

It appears Iowa State hired a new head football coach just in time. Some of its committed recruits were beginning to reconsider their options.

Bettendorf offensive lineman Kyle Lichtenberg, who has been committed to Iowa State since last spring, was making an official visit to Iowa this weekend. Lichtenberg has family ties to ISU and isn’t likely to change his mind easily, but the mere fact that he visited the Hawkeyes is an indication that new coach Paul Rhoads needs to move quickly to shore up his recruits.

Also visiting Iowa this weekend, according to Rivals.com, was Troy Smith, a cornerback from Indianapolis Pike High School who runs a 4.4 40 and had eight interceptions last fall. Two prime recruits from the Princeton Hun School in New Jersey – linebacker Donald Coleman and offensive tackle Nolan MacMillan – checked out the Iowa campus last week. Coleman has since made a verbal commitment to North Carolina State, but MacMillan has made only one other visit, to Georgia Tech.

Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz was on the road recruiting in New Jersey this past week and reportedly had a home visit with 6-foot-2, 217-pound Ka’lial Glaud, who could play a variety of positions at the college level. Glaud is from the same high school as Shonn Greene and is a nephew of former Hawkeye pass-rushing star Le Roy Smith. He has offers on the table from a half dozen ACC and Big East schools.