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Hard to know the right thing to do in that situation, on the Auburn side of things.  What's the least disrespectful thing to do?  What do you owe your backups?  Run your offense with the starters = no.  Run your offense with the backups is okay...unless they're too effective.  Then you just run the ball up the middle every play with your backups, which isn't really respecting anyone, it's barely football.  When you're in FG range, is going for it on 4th down polite?  What if you keep getting the 1st downs?  Then you look like an A-hole.  But FGs put more points on the board.



Basically, in this instance, Auburn mercy-ruled PU and there were no right answers.  Awkward to watch, even envisioning yourself as a PU player/coach or AU player/coach.

I know what the Badgers would have done.

With proper management of your playsheet and personnel you can utilize the situation to get invaluable reps for your lower units without embarrassing the opposing players or exposing anybody to injury unnecessarily injury. 

Back in the day when Nebraska was still good enough to rout people regularly, Osborne would send in the 2nd teamers and call pretty much the full gamut of running plays, with a short pass or two mixed in. In the last 8-10 minutes the freshmen and walkons would go in, and run base concepts as a building block for the future. 

Bill Synder had a different approach; he would send in his backups and run the offense full-bore, just as he'd expect them to play if called upon in crunch time. Eventually the freshmen and walkons would go in, and the offense would stall, but sometimes things got pretty ugly before reaching that point.  

Either works, but personally I am not a fan of asking your kids to run into a pile and risk injury just to burn clock. Even a blowout in a 3rd-tier bowl is an opportunity for experience that cannot be replicated in practice. Put it to use, and give your backups something to play for. 

In a blow out, I would run a partial playbook.  I'm not going to run gimmick plays obviously, nor throw bombs, nor screens, I might have the QB 2 throw some slants or to the TE depending.  Late in the game it would be only running plays.

EMU wasn't too bad either to be fair.  And at the time Minnesota had just gotten blown out by the worst team in the Big Ten.  We didn't know that the Gophers were about to turn a corner.

Nah, Year 2 in the program the benefit of the bowl practices grossly outweighs the downside to getting run off the field in a mid tier bowl game.

And losing that but keeping Brohm sends better vibes into the postseason than vice versa.

True in theory no doubt, but if you were playing better before the bowl practices than after.... did they really help?

Yes

You've had quite the roller coaster season. From sky is the limit preseason aspirations, to declaring that the EMU loss cost you a chance at a Bowl Game, to the OSU upset generating short lived Big Ten Title hopes, to crashing back to Earth in gut wrenching fashion down the stretch, to winning the Old Oaken Bucket on the road and sneaking into a Bowl Game after all, to the whole Louisville thing, then last and least getting pantsed by an SEC team on National TV and wishing that you'd been right about the Emu loss dashing your Bowl hopes.

There were no aspirations preseason  We knew our roster was still mediocre, our surprisingly good 2017 defense graduated everyone, and our schedule was hell.