TAMPA, Fla. — It's been 34 days since Auburn last played a football game, but the Tigers only have 24 more hours to wait before facing Northwestern in the Outback Bowl.

"Our football team is to the point right now that we're ready to play," Auburn coach head Gene Chizik said. "When you have your last game close to a month ago, there's a lot of stuff in between, but now I think our football team is really focused in on the last 24 hours. And we need to be."

The Tigers will have a walkthrough at Raymond James Stadium this morning before being dismissed briefly at 1 p.m. They'll convene again at 6 p.m. to begin going through their normal routine the day before a game, with dinner, a devotional and meetings.

"It's going to be exactly like we do it when we leave to go to LaGrange every week," Chizik said.

Kickoff tomorrow is at 11 a.m. ET. The game will be televised by ESPN.

Chizik thinks the team has had more than its share of time to prepare, which can be both good and bad.

"Sometimes the evils of this much time is you have every game, you see everything, so if a team does something once in a game, or twice in a game, or two or three times in a game, but very infrequently, you have to prepare for that in your mind and you think this is a possibility," he said. "Too much knowledge of what they do ... that can happen to you. So I think when you go to bowl seasons, I think that what you do is you stick to what you do, you try to be simple, you let your guys play fast and don't be paralyzed by knowing too much."

Northwestern hasn't won a bowl game in 60 years, so it should be plenty motivated. Chizik thinks his squad will be just as ready to play, however.

"As we told our football team, this is not necessarily the last football game of 2009," he said. "It's the first game of 2010."

Here are a few other notes and quotes from today ...

• Chizik doesn't necessarily mind the early start time. "Our players like it and our coaches like it because you don't have to get up all day and think about it, watch everybody else," he said. "You get up, you eat, you go to the stadium and you play. I think that's the way that our coaches and players would prefer to do that. We like that. We like getting up and getting going."

• Northwestern will spend its night like it usually does -- watching the TV series "24." Why "24"? "Jack Bauer," Wildcats coach Pat Fitzgerald said. "That's all that needs to be said. He's a modern day MacGyver." Somewhere Richard Dean Anderson is smiling.

• It might rain tomorrow. Fitzgerald doesn't think that will mean it'll be a low-scoring game. "I think when the weather is inclement, it's an advantage for the offense," he said. "I've always thought that way. The offense knows the count, knows what direction of the play, especially when you're throwing the ball, you don't have to worry about slipping." He doesn't necessarily think it favors a running-based team.

• Fitzgerald on Northwestern's 60-year bowl win drought: "There's an 800-pound gorilla in the corner of the room and I'm really looking forward to getting it off our back and you guys can stop talking about it. But since Day 1, our goal has been to win a bowl."

• Fitzgerald thinks highly of Auburn: "It's not going to be easy. It's going to be against the best team we've played all year." That's high praise ( or perhaps a predictable platitude on the eve of a bowl game) from a coach whose team played and beat an unbeaten Iowa team that was ranked in the Top 5.