They’ve been up at the usual place for a few days, but I haven’t had a chance to write anything until now.

The main thing I did for these update the CFP/NY6 to reflect the rivalry week results. If everything goes chalk this weekend, I suspect the CFP part of the equation won’t change much. However, there’s a a couple variables at work, and they both involve the Rose Bowl:

1. How the Committee treats Utah if they lose to USC tomorrow. Currently Utah is one spot ahead of Washington. If the Committee drops Utah below Washington after what would be their 4th loss, 10-2 Washington will get the Rose Bowl nod. I’m currently predicting this will happen.
2. I didn’t realize this, but according to the Rose Bowl’s own website they do have some prerogatives if they have a repeat team. In this case, it’d be Ohio State, who went to the Rose Bowl last season and in 2018.

If the Rose decides they don’t want Ohio State again, then Ohio State would then go to the Orange Bowl. Penn State would head to Pasadena, and Tennessee would go to the Cotton Bowl. This then triggers other downstream changes, as the ReliaQuest (formerly Outback) Bowl would then have to pick an ACC team. If I had to guess, that would most likely be ACC championship game loser, NC State, or Notre Dame.

We also found out earlier today that New Mexico State got a waiver from the NCAA to be bowl eligible. I am not sure of the details, but I believe they would still need to get to 6-6. They have scheduled Valpraiso this weekend, so I suspect it has to do with being able to count 2 FCS teams. I don’t believe Army has done this yet.

Otherwise, I’ll be keeping an eye on how things shake out this weekend and will try to have my final predictions up on Saturday night or Sunday morning before the playoff and other bowls are announced. Stay tuned!

The predictions are in the usual place.

The events of last weekend shookup the playoff picture a bit. Based on what I think the committee will do tomorrow, these are my best guesses for both the playoff and associated New Year’s Six bowls.

After that, I did use all of the independents, as well as JMU and one 5-7 team. Rice and UNLV I both have projected to finish 5-7, and they’re both tied atop the APR standings (as I understand them).

Overall, we’ve got 74 teams bowl eligible now, and depending on stuff breaks this weekend, we could get there. That said, I think it’s pretty likely every 6 win or better team will be needed, which is pretty good news if you’re a UConn fan.

That’s it for this week. The real action starts next week, when I start scouring for any possible news. Until then, it’s time for rivalry week.

They’re up, hot and fresh over at the usual place. Let’s hit the high notes.

• I wound up short 1 team, so I slotted JMU in per the NCAA criteria. I still need to confirm if this is actually possible. For now, we continue to tick up to the required number: we now have 64 bowl eligible teams, so we need 18 more.
• The playoff picture looks different this week since I wound up doing this after the post-Week 11 rankings were released. I’m counting on LSU getting punished for losing to UGA in the SEC Championship Game, otherwise, we’ll probably have 4 SEC teams. Tennessee will continue to be a fringe playoff contender unless they lose, and Bama doesn’t look like it can fall out of the top 10.
• Man, Texas-Oregon would be a rad Alamo Bowl. And, of course, we continue to project, and root for, the ultimate Sun Bowl rematch.
• Finally, shout out to the University of Connecticut Huskies, for not only defeating Liberty, but getting to 6 wins in the process. Look, if we wind up with 82 other teams that are bowl eligible, the Huskies probably won’t get in, since they don’t have any official tie-ins and among other teams in that situation (BYU and Liberty), they’re probably at the bottom of the pecking order. It always seems to shake out that enough upsets happen to get us to enough teams, but if we’re at exactly 82 or less, UConn’s going to go bowling for the first time for the first time since 2015.

I wanted to these with the release of the College Football Playoff rankings this year, so some changes I’d planned to make I had to scrap at the last minute. So, yeah, the matchups aren’t there yet, but they’ll be fixed by next week’s edition. For now, take a look at this.

I’m getting a little better at parsing my way though ESPN Events bowl games, but nonetheless this is way more of a crapshoot than it was before most of the current agreements took effect in 2020.

Just like last year, I am using SP+ to predict every team’s path to bowl eligibility (or not). This has left me short six teams, but I’m pretty sure we’ll get some upsets that will allow this number to shrink over the coming weeks. I’ll have more notes in future weeks, but for now, enjoy!

First off, the latest predictions are here. I would consider this week a bit of a “living document”, as if I can scrape together any news before this weekend abut anyone going anywhere I will try to include. This is significantly harder than it used to be, though, as I discuss below.

It turns out a bunch of stuff happened this weekend, and one of those things, to my surprise, was that we got over the 82-team bar that we needed to have enough bowl eligible teams. In fact, there’s 83!

So with that settled, there are also three teams that have accepted invites. My process this year, as detailed previously, is different in the past. One of things I have tried to do ensure that I have captured the agreements the conferences have with bowls as closely as possible. A typical agreement these days, especially for Group of Five conferences, is that they will have 2-4 “permanent” bowl affiliations and some number of teams they’ll provide to ESPN Events (which, again, owns about half of the bowl games). This number is anywhere from 1 to 5.

After I allocated those slots, I was left with 6 teams that did not have a bowl game, with 5 slots to fill. In the real bowl games, there can be some shuffling within the ESPN Events group of bowls and this is nearly impossible to predict. For instance, currently BYU is slotted to the Independence Bowl. However, it’s entirely possible that to create a more attractive matchup, they could be moved to some other ESPN Events bowl. While UTSA isn’t exactly chopped liver, it’s likely that BYU and ESPN would want a matchup more appropriate for a team that has gone 5-0 against the Pac-12 this year. (In some ways, where they really should be is in Vegas this weekend to play, say, Oregon for the Pac-12 title, but still.)