We know that when you’re looking for bowl projections, you don’t want to know what some random writers think your team will do with the rest of your season. You can look at the remaining schedules yourselves. No, what you want to know is where your team is sitting in bowl pecking order RIGHT NOW. So that’s exactly what we are going to give you.
The only things that we are predicting, by absolute necessity, are who will end up as conference champions and who will be bowl-eligible. We have to predict the conference champions because it is not realistic to just put the top-ranked teams into the Playoff and New Year’s Six games. We will try to keep the current “champion” as the team currently leading the conference, but we do reserve the right to predict who will win when teams are tied or the winner of conference championship games (which is totally okay because we are telling you that we’re gonna do that).
We also have to predict who will be bowl-eligible. The good news is that with 80 bowl slots, it’s pretty much a guarantee that a 6-6 team will get a bowl bid. Even if a team wins two games against FCS teams to get to 6-6 (which usually doesn’t earn a bowl), this year it will be enough. And if there still aren’t enough bowl teams after that, then 5-7 teams will be selected based in order of APR scores (the NCAA’s graduation rate system). Both John and I currently expect there to be 79 teams at 6-6 or better, which means they each have one 5-7 team in with a good APR score, indicated by a * next to their name. Even after we’re predicting games to see who gets to 6-6, the bowl projections are still based on where teams stand now. That’s because we want to show you where your team currently sits. If your team keeps winning, they’ll move up in the bowl order. Start losing, and you could see those prestigious bowls slip away.
As of right now, we’re both split over whether the season-ending neck injury to Baylor quarterback Seth Russell will negatively impact the Bears standing in the eyes of the selection committee, as you’ll see in who we have in the CFP semifinals. We’re also not in agreement as to which Group of Five school will make a New Year’s Six bowl, even though we anticipate that team coming from the same conference. And we both think it’s only fitting that two schools with very similar narratives heading into 2015 should clash on New Year’s Day.
Find out where we have your school going in our first iteration of bowl projections for 2015.
(Mobile readers may have to turn their devices sideways to view the full projections.)
LWOS Bowl Projections (After Week 8)
College Football Playoff
New Year’s Six
Rest of the Bowls
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