The Console War Takes to the Gridiron: The Xbox Bowl

When it comes to brand new bowl games for the 2025 season, none are more highly anticipated than the Xbox Bowl! Played at the illustrious Ford Center at the Star in Frisco, Texas, the XBox Bowl will be contested this year by the Sun Belt’s Arkansas State Red Wolves and Conference USA’s Missouri State Bears. These two mid-major giants will be fighting for the right to become the Master Chief of College Football.

The New Console War

The Xbox Bowl will be replacing the Bahamas Bowl on the schedule, and will be played at the 12,000 seat Dallas Cowboys practice facility that also hosts the East-West Shrine Bowl, Dallas High School Football, and will be hosting the Frisco Bowl this year as well due to renovations being done to Toyota Stadium. Since this is college football’s newest bowl game, the illustrious history of the event has yet to be written, but the anticipation of the event is sure to make this the greatest Fortnite in-game event yet!

Birth of a Rivalry

The Bears and Red Wolves have met four times before, where Arkansas State has won every meeting since the first in 1991. All of these tilts were home games for Arkansas State, with the most recent coming in 2015 where the Red Wolves won a close one 70-7. Fun fact for this one: While Arkansas State’s football archrival is Memphis in the Paint Bucket Bowl rivalry series, Arkansas State and Missouri State gained popularity as de facto regional rivals for fans of the EA Sports College Football video games. While there isn’t any real rivalry here (yet), this could be the start of a very unique kind of rivalry that stems from video games and bleeds into real life in a video game sponsored bowl game. It should be mentioned that this is the first game between the schools when both teams were FBS programs, so this is a whole new beginning for the rivalry on several fronts.

Meet the Red Wolves

The home team on the scoreboard will be the 6-6 Arkansas State Red Wolves, who were able to turn around a 1-4 start to the season with an impressive finish, including wins at Troy and Appalachian State to secure bowl eligibility. The team is coached by Butch Jones in his fifth season, who is in his fourth stop as a head coach. He is perhaps most well known for his strong runs at Central Michigan and Cincinnati before a mixed-bag of a five year tenure at Tennessee. Arkansas State has been in the FBS division of college football since 1992, and has in that time won five Sun Belt Championships and five bowl games.

The team’s on-field leader is unquestionably Jaylen Raynor, a Junior quarterback from Kernersville, North Carolina. He has over 3,000 passing yards on the season with 14 touchdowns, despite having issues with interceptions and sacks throughout the year. Wide receivers Corey Rucker and Chauncy Cobb act as reliable targets Raynor, both having over 750 yards receiving on the season and a nice 69 receptions a piece. While Jaylen Raynor himself leads the team in carries, Sophomore Devin Spencer is the team’s leading rusher with 523 yards and 2 touchdowns. The defense is led by Junior linebacker Aaron Alexander, who has 88 total tackles on the season. The team is not expecting any opt-outs, and are relatively healthy coming into the game.

Meet the Bears

On the other side of the field, the Missouri Bears are coming off of a 7-5 finish to their first season as an FBS team. While technically ineligible for a bowl game despite the winning record due to transition rules for FCS teams moving to the FBS level, Missouri State was allowed to participate due to a lack of bowl-eligible teams throughout the rest of the FBS ranks. Their head coach through the season was Ryan Beard in his third season, but he has since left to take the HC job at Coastal Carolina, leaving offensive coordinator Nick Petrino to act as interim head coach for the game. Nick Petrino is the son of longtime coach Bobby Petrino, who also just completed a season as interim head coach at Arkansas. The Bears had a tough schedule in their first season in CUSA, but had a solid middle stretch of the season that includes wins at Marshall, Liberty and against UTEP.

Besides losing their head coach, Missouri State is also going to be playing without their starting center Cash Hudson, who has left the team to enter the transfer portal. The offense will be operating under Senior quarterback Jacob Clark, who has 2,895 yards and 24 passing touchdowns on the season as a classic pocket passer. He, like his counterpart Jaylen Raynor, has struggled with interceptions and sacks on the year. The most efficient member of the offense this season has been Senior FIU transfer running back Shomari Lawrence, who needs just 36 yards to score a his first 1000 yard season. The ball is distributed very evenly in the passing game, with nine different receivers bringing in receptions at a somewhat reliable clip, but the leader through the air has been Junior wideout Jmariyae Robinson, who paces the team with 536 yards and 6 touchdowns.

The Xbox Bowl is poised to become college football's newest and most prestigious bowl game on Thursday, where the trash talk promises to resemble mid-2000s Xbox Live game lobbies. The lights are lit, the teams are decked out with brand new ROG Xbox Ally systems, and everyone in Frisco is asking the same question: Which team will emerge as the new Master Chiefs of the Xbox Bowl, and who will be the Master Chumps?