Final LWOS Bowl Projections

If you thought the College Football Playoff was going to soften the controversy regarding the national championship conversation, think again. Despite the fact that there was not a single upset amongst the teams in the thick of the national title hunt, we are sitting here with the imminent release of the selection committee’s rankings completely aware of the fact there are three teams with a legitimate case for that fourth and final slot and that two of them will be immensely unhappy with where they find themselves.

Yes, Alabama, Oregon and Florida State pretty much solidified their place in the CFP with wins, but TCU, Baylor and especially Ohio State turned in compelling performances in their own right which will make the committee’s job that much more difficult as they attempt to put together the semifinal pairings. It’s beyond the scope of this article to succinctly analyze the details of this conundrum so you should read Yesh’s commentary on the issue to get all the facts. Still, you will see how each of us decided how to handle the situation in our picks for the semifinal games below.

What’s clear is regardless of the manner in which college football determines its national champion, there will always be myriad opinions, often vehement disagreement regarding the teams selected to contest it, and almost limitless water cooler conversation. And you know what, that’s what makes this sport so great.

Mike Loveall has joined John and Yesh this week to provide an added voice as to where we see all the bowls in terms of who gets selected. Regardless of what happens at the top, the overall bowl selection process is fascinating in and of itself, and it’s always fun as a college football writer and analyst to prognosticate how the rest of the games pan out.

Clearly, 38 bowls was more than enough to account for the 82 teams that finished bowl eligible this year vying for 76 spots. It’s too bad for Georgia Southern, who won the Sun Belt Conference in their first season as a member but is a transitional member of FBS this year having moved up from FCS and so doesn’t qualify for a bowl.

The biggest non-CFP quandary is the issue of UAB, who at 6-6 is eligible for a bowl out of Conference USA. It was announced earlier this week that their football program was shutting down and the public outcry over this unfortunate sequence of events has been rightfully vociferous. Though it will be difficult if not impossible to force the university administrators who came to this decision to reverse course, it would be massive for these athletes who work so hard both on the field and in the classroom to be rewarded with one last game. Someone invite this team to a bowl, please!

Anyways, here are our final and decisive picks for all 38 postseason match-ups, from the New Orleans Bowl which starts us off on December 20th all the way to the last non-title game contest, the GoDaddy Bowl from Mobile, AL on January 9th. As each conference vies for supremacy, Mike has provided a great analysis (which can be found below our projected pairings) on the most important elements in terms of what goes into determining who did the best when all’s set and done.

Final LWOS Bowl Projections

All games will be televised by ESPN unless otherwise noted with the following symbols:

* – ABC

# – ESPN2

@ – CBS

Bowl season is interesting because it’s the best measure to determine strength of conferences. Of course, this occurs at the end of the season, so we don’t know where we’ve overweighted and underweighted conferences until it’s too late. I usually measure conference strength by looking at the following factors:

Pure wins and losses: Comparing the conference records of bowl season is the best single measurement. The teams are generally playing comparable competition (see below) with same general conditions. All teams are travelling and playing at neutral sites, all have had three to four weeks of rest, and all will have the same distractions.

Strength of bowl: If you’re playing in a bowl on December 30th or 31st or on January 1st or 2nd, that win carries more weight than one on December 20th. This isn’t just about dates, but about the quality of the bowl. If a Power-Five conference contracts with a bowl that has a “group of five” contract, that bowl shouldn’t carry nearly the same weight as two Power-Five teams playing in a bowl. This might hurt the ACC with two bowls against AAC teams and whichever conference fills the Armed Forces Bowl.

All other big name conferences only have one bowl tie-in with a group of five conference, except the Big 12 which has zero. The Big 12, however, didn’t have enough bowl-eligible teams to fill their contracts, which kind of cancels that advantage out for them. I usually break bowls up into three tiers: Access/CFP bowls, P5-P5 bowls, and all others. For this year, the important bowls are Dec 27^th and beyond, as I see it.

Obviously, winning in the CFP and in the Access Bowls is very important, but that only speaks to the strength of the top-tier of each conference. The Big 12, even with only six bowl-eligible teams, will likely get three teams into the top tier; if they go 3-0 in those bowls, that speaks volumes about the strength of that conference.

Inter-conference rankings: with conferences controlling more and more of the bowl match-ups, it will interesting to see if they purposely pair a lower ranked team against a strong opponent to give three or four other teams in the conference easier opponents in their bowls. The SEC could really set their desired slate with their “group of six” bowls and dictate the inter-conference match-ups.

For example, in the Belk Bowl you are likely to have a Duke team that is no less than a fifth-ranked ACC team playing a South Carolina team that cannot be ranked higher than ninth in the SEC and probably should be ranked 11th in the conference. A South Carolina win here carries significantly more weight than a 4-5 or 5-6 match-up. In fact, it might carry even more weight than an Access Bowl win when determining overall conference strength.

Number of teams in bowls: While this is the lowest of the criteria, it is still important to recognize a conference for having a large number of teams in bowls. While the Big 12 has three teams in the CFP and Access tier, they only have six total teams (60% of conference) eligible for bowls. At the very least, this speaks to a lack of parity within the conference and depending on the inter-conference records and competition, might indicate a weak conference overall.

Meanwhile, the SEC, with 12 of 14 teams bowl eligible, stands to gain credibility if it has 12/14 bowl eligible and ALSO has a strong bowl season, which would mean that the parity and wins and losses against each other in conference is generally at a higher level than other conferences. This is more of a multiplicative factor more than a weight, only to be considered after the three considerations listed above.

Once the dust is settled, we can go back and re-look our assumptions and thoughts concerning each conference and each team this season. And then, we can debate and discuss all off-season in preparation for the 2015 campaign.

Either way, we will know Sunday night where everyone is headed to for the 2014 bowl season.

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