Everything you need to know for the Lobos' clash with Minnesota in the Rate Bowl

Everything you need to know about New Mexico’s meeting with Minnesota in the Rate Bowl:

Who: New Mexico (9-3) vs. Minnesota (7-5)

When and where: 2:30 p.m. on Dec. 26 at Chase Field — the home of the Arizona Diamondbacks — in Phoenix.

How to watch/listen: ESPN will carry UNM-Minnesota, but a broadcast crew has not yet been announced. Robert Portnoy (play-by-play) and DonTrell Moore (analyst) will also call the game via radio on the Lobo Radio Network (770 AM/96.3 FM).

Who’s favored: Minnesota is a 3-point favorite over UNM, per Draft Kings. The over/under is set at 47½ points.

Top storyline(s): Well, take your pick.

• A win over Minnesota would give UNM its first 10-win season since 1982, and only the second ever in program history. “(It’s) a big part of it, too,” head coach Jason Eck said in a news conference Monday, “just trying to leave a legacy.”
• UNM could improve to 2-1 against Big Ten teams under Eck, an unprecedented feat for a program that didn’t have a Big Ten win under its belt entering this season. “We want to put our best foot forward and play our best football,” Eck said in a Sunday news conference. “But it’s going to be obviously a huge challenge.”
• A win could put UNM — who’s received votes the last two weeks in the AP Top 25 — in position to end the season ranked at 10-3.
• Eck said last week that getting left out of the Mountain West Championship was “in some ways, an injustice.” But a win against Minnesota “might tell a lot,” he added, “because if we go play poorly in the bowl game, it’s really easy for everyone to say, ‘you know what, we were right about that. New Mexico didn’t belong in that championship game.’

“We go play really well, and kick the crap out of somebody, then I think it gives validity to our case that, yeah, we were the best team in the conference this year.”

Of course, the Lobos have plenty of work to do to get to that point: Minnesota is not only a bigger, stronger Big Ten opponent, but the Gophers boast a perfect 6-0 record in bowls under ninth-year head coach P.J. Fleck.

“The mindset is doing everything we can to be 1-0 and go play our best football game of the year, no matter who’s out there,” Fleck said in a news conference Sunday. I think that’s one of the biggest challenges and one of the most exciting things in bowl preparation as you go forward, too … We look at it as a one-game championship season.”

Gophers to watch: Defensive end Anthony Smith earned first team All-Big Ten honors after finishing the regular season with 10.5 sacks, a figure Eck called “impressive.” And while the Gophers don’t have many offensive players with truly gaudy statistics, quarterback Drake Lindsey was rock solid this season, completing 228 of 361 passes for 2,235 yards, 16 touchdowns and six interceptions.

Minnesota also has one New Mexico product on its roster: Freshman offensive lineman Mark Handy, a 6-foot-7, 320-pound La Cueva High School graduate. He has not appeared in a game for the Gophers this season.

Lobos to watch: For a team like UNM, there’s already plenty of motivation baked into playing a Power Four team like Minnesota. But for a handful of the Lobos’ seniors — defensive end Keyshawn James-Newby in particular — the Rate Bowl represents another chance to put up good reps before they vie for a roster spot in the NFL.

“It’s amazing, man,” James-Newby said Sunday. “ … It gives me the opportunity to get another look against a high level team. So I’m excited to put on for my team, my family and the people of New Mexico.”

What happened the last time these teams played: UNM and Minnesota have never met on the gridiron, so the Rate Bowl will be the first-ever matchup between both programs. But Eck — a Wisconsin graduate — has a history with the Gophers, compiling a 6-1 record as a player and graduate assistant for the Badgers in the “Battle for Paul Bunyan’s Axe.”

“We had a pretty good run against them,” he said Sunday. “Most of the years that I was there, I think every year I was a player, we won the axe. My last game as a graduate assistant (in 2001), we lost the axe up there.

“ … But that was a big game. One of our offensive line coaches, who I played for on the offensive line and I was a graduate assistant for, Jim Hueber, he had coached on both sides of the rivalry. He had worked for Lou Holtz at Minnesota and (John Gutekunst), I believe, and then worked for (Barry Alvarez) at Wisconsin. He would give a lot of the history of the game, a very special rivalry to be a part of.”

The Rate Bowl also used to be the Copper Bowl, which represented the first bowl game Eck ever went to as a player in 1996. A year later, it was renamed the Insight.com Bowl — a game in which UNM fell 20-14 to Arizona in head coach Dennis Franchione’s final season with the program.