LWOS Bowl Projections (through Week 13)

With conference championship week looming, the college football postseason picture is slowly coming together as we detail in this week's bowl projections.

Less than a week remains until the participants in this year’s 40 bowls, including the four semifinalists of the second College Football Playoff, will be revealed. This coming Sunday is shaping up to be a fairly exciting one as teams get to know where they’re headed for the postseason.

Conference championships are the main focus this weekend. Three of them should have a direct impact on who gets selected for the CFP. The ACC, Big Ten and SEC will all crown their champion on Saturday with the favorites looking to hold serve and book their spot in college football’s final four. You’d have to expect that Clemson, Alabama and the winner out of the Big Ten are locks, as well as Oklahoma.

With our bowl projections being a snap shot of the current bowl picture, that’s exactly what we’re anticipating. It will certainly make for an interesting lead-up to Sunday afternoon’s CFP selection show if one of these teams ends up falling victim to the upset bug. And for those of us who have followed the sport for an extended period of time know full well you get that type of scenario every once in a while.

Two conferences, the Big 12 and Sun Belt, still have regular season games to play. Two games stand out with respect to the bowls. Kansas State hosts West Virginia and if the 5-6 Wildcats can defend home turf in Manhattan, they’ll be going bowling. The same can be said about Georgia State. The Panthers face rival Georgia Southern and need one more win to get bowl eligible. It would be a great story for a GSU program that began play in 2010 and went a combined 2-33 over the past three seasons.

With the bowls needing to fill 80 slots, there is the possibility that not enough teams with .500 or better records will be available. As of right now, 75 schools have at least six wins and if Kansas State and Georgia State both get a W on Saturday, that number would increase to 77 with no more regular season games to play. That means there will be at least three and potentially five teams at 5-7 who will have to be selected for a bowl.

What will be the process of picking these teams with losing records?

It became a bit clearer on Monday when the NCAA announced a contingency plan for this very situation. Essentially teams will be awarded a bowl invite based on their Academic Performance Rate (APR) score which tracks programs’ performance in the classroom. The top schools in the ranking that finished with five wins will be selected until all the bowl spots have been filled.

Four teams are currently projected to qualify a bowl via APR in our latest projections. As mentioned above, we think Kansas State will get that sixth win and get bowl eligible the old-fashioned way even though we’re not expecting Georgia State to be as lucky. Those four are listed below along with their APR score in parentheses.

Nebraska (985), Minnesota (975), San Jose State (975), Illinois (973)

These are also teams that have given every indication they will accept a bowl big if given one. Missouri, whose APR score stands at 976 and as such would qualify, have already said they will not do so. The four will have an asterisk next to their name in our projections.

One bowl matchup is already a certainty as ESPN’s Brett McMurphy reported that Western Michigan and Middle Tennessee will face off in the Bahamas Bowl on December 24th. Their names will be in bold face to indicate they’ve accepted bowl bids.

Now that we’ve elaborated upon all that, it’s time to look at how we see all the bowl games panning out, including the CFP and national championship game. Find out where your school is projected to go for the holidays below.