Last month, the NIU football team went to a bowl game it deserved to be in and played a team of comparable ability. Nice concept, isn’t it?

It’s unfortunate this notion has been lost on NIU in recent years. The Huskies – along with many other mid-major programs – have a nasty habit of accepting invitations to obscure bowl games against superior teams, only to return with a lopsided loss.

This year was different, in that NIU beat Fresno State in the uDrove Humanitarian Bowl. Disregarding the 40-17 final score, the Huskies were mere two-point favorites going into the Dec. 18 contest. And ignoring every penny that goes to bowl games and doesn’t come back, the only thing that matters is having a game worth watching.

The Huskies hadn’t been in a competitively interesting game before last month since they beat Troy in the 2004 Silicon Valley Football Classic. Unlike this season’s bowl game, the previous three offered little reason to watch.

In 2006, NIU accepted an invitation to play Texas Christian University in the Poinsettia Bowl. Taking on TCU when the Horned Frogs where just beginning their meteoric rise to fame could not have been a worse idea. The Huskies were routed 37-7.

NIU capped the 2008 campaign with an Independence Bowl meeting with Louisiana Tech. The Huskies finished the regular season 6-6 and offered little reasoning as to why they deserved to be in any bowl game. NIU lost to the Bulldogs 17-10.

The following season, the Huskies took on South Florida in the International Bowl. NIU kept the Bulls at bay in the first half, but the talent discrepancy showed in the second half of a 27-3 USF win.

The saddest fact is NIU hasn’t learned anything from the beat downs of 2006, 2008 and 2009. The Huskies would have most likely repeated history if it weren’t for the 2010 season going down the proverbial toilet against Miami (OH) in the MAC Championship game.

Throughout the week before the conference title game, both the MAACO Las Vegas Bowl and Hyundai Sun Bowl were in contact with NIU. The Huskies would have almost certainly been an underdog in either of those games, considering they would be going in as an at-large selection against a quality Mountain West or Atlantic Coast Conference team.

Even the Humanitarian Bowl could have been more challenging had the Huskies won the MAC Championship. Humanitarian Bowl officials had been working with NIU on setting up a matchup with Nevada. In all honesty, Nevada would have done terrible things to the Huskies in Bronco Stadium.

Building a team that can compete with the Boise State’s and TCU’s of the world takes time. Definitely longer than the (almost) three years that Jerry Kill gave NIU. Mid-majors can’t scrape the bottom of the BCS standings every five to 10 years and expect to compete with quality, non-conference teams on a regular basis.

The only certainty is that there will be a lot more losses at the Papa John’s/Little Caesar’s/Credit Union Bowl if the Huskies don’t start looking for wins instead of just games.