It’s that time once again. In the interest of not burying the lead, here’s a direct link to the first edition of the 2015 bowl predictions.

Again, the process is the same that I’ve been using in the past few years, though without the BCS part. The key thing to realize is that I go through every team, look at their remaining schedule, and then try to figure out how many more games they will win. This early, this tends to not be a very exact science, as since this is college football we’re talking about, wacky upsets happen.

This time around, for the time in a long time (if ever), I’m actually short three teams. Of course, we have 80 possible bids this year, so the fact I’m predicting 77 of the sport’s 127 teams at this level will have .500 records or better is still pretty astounding. This is where the previous paragraph comes in: since upsets will happen and some teams will improve while others get worse, you’ll have a team that really closes out the year and rallies to a 8-4 record while another might slump to 7-5 after starting 5-2. It’s hard to call these things, sometimes. Nonetheless, I probably do need to see which teams would be eligible at 5-7, if it comes to that.

In previous years, I released the picks this week because this is usually when the first BCS standings came out. Without the BCS I’m now trying to guess what a group of thirteen people will vote on in a conference room in Dallas in a couple of weeks. To give an idea of what I mean by my not predicting a lot of upsets, though, the teams in the playoffs and the committee-controlled bowls all have two losses or less by my current predictions, which will probably not wind up being the case by the time December rolls around.

So, to reiterate: it’s early. If I have your team in the Boca Raton Bowl instead of the Orange Bowl, don’t panic. I’m probably wrong.