Category Archives: bowl predictions

Bowl Predictions 2016: Week 3

The latest predictions are now available (subject to change for anything completely unexpected on Tuesday).

At any rate, things are still pretty sketchy. Even for the CFP-controlled bowls, where I had to put in a 3-loss Auburn for lack of any other teams. Fortunately, second-half Auburn is looking like a pretty good team, but still, it doesn’t feel quite right to have a 3-loss team in these (supposedly) marquee matchups.

I’ll just hit some other thoughts in bullet points below:

  • Boise’s loss at Wyoming on Saturday may not put them out entirely. After all, they’ve still got a win over the probable Pac-12 North runner-up Washington State, which is still a better win than any of Western Michigan’s. Also, I think most would agree the Mountain West is stronger than the MAC. It will really depend on how the Committee ranks them going forward. Boise still has a pretty good chance to win their division, which would also let them face a pretty good San Diego State team in the Mountain West championship game. A win against the Aztecs would probably be better than any of Western Michigan’s wins except maybe the one over Northwestern.
  • I’m still short five teams. I even included a 6-6 Army team (with two wins over FCS teams) and a 5-7 Vanderbilt team (top-5 APR), so I’m really short seven. That’s really the entire potential pool of teams according to the rules. I’m not really sure what will happen if that comes to pass. Last year I still was missing five teams as late as Week 7, but things nevertheless worked out.
  • Suffice it to say, I think there are too many bowls. I’d guess the one likeliest to fold after this year is the Arizona Bowl, which still doesn’t have a real TV deal. Most of the other bowl games that you’d like are likely to fold are probably owned by ESPN. Given ESPN’s own troubles in terms of subscriber losses, that may spell doom for these games, but I’d guess not. Bowl games aren’t very expensive to put on, and there’s not much else going on during the holidays. If I had to hazard another guess, I’d go with the Cure Bowl, which was a game that took forever for the organizers to put together (it was on the “potential new bowl game” lists for years) and has a TV deal with the CBS Sports Network. I think 38 is more reasonable, but as a person who likes bowl games I’d say the ideal number is 30-35.
  • January 1st is a Sunday this year, so the traditional New Year’s Day bowls are split between New Year’s Eve and January 2nd. Nonetheless, putting 3 SEC teams in the CFP-controlled bowls really exposes the SEC’s weak underbelly this year, by which I mean there’s probably going to be 3 SEC East teams in New Year’s Day bowl games.
  • And yes, I did slot Georgia Tech over Miami because even though no one actually involved with the game would want it, I’m sure the Powers That Be (TM) would like the storylines around a Georgia Tech-Navy matchup.

That’s that for now. Hopefully we’ll know more next week!

Bowl Predictions 2016: Week 1

Taking a brief break from work (Monday through Thursday) Civilization VI (tonight) to let y’all know that I uploaded Week 1 of the bowl predictions. I’m hoping to have more time to elaborate on the process here later, but for now, I need to get the preview up.

Quickly though, as per usual it’s still hard tell to anything when there’s still teams that haven’t played six games yet. Right now I’m short 6 teams, even. The bowl predictions page is also a fully updated and correct bowl schedule. The only thing I haven’t pulled yet is the APR standings, which, well, look like they’re going to come into play this year.

Bowl Predictions 2015: Epilogue

They’re no longer predictions really, so it’s more that the full schedule is now available.

I don’t ordinarily follow up on the predictions in this fashion, but I thought it would be appropriate in this case because there’s a lot of stuff that happened.

In the playoff, I was wrong about Oklahoma and Michigan State’s positions, but reasonable people can disagree. What I don’t like, though, is 1-loss Iowa finishing ahead of 1-loss Ohio State in the final poll, sending Iowa to the Rose Bowl instead of the Buckeyes. Considering that they both lost to the same team, Ohio State’s superior statistical profile and stronger best win should have kept them above the Hawkeyes. This had a ripple effect, I figure, on the rest of the CFP field, since Ohio State will head west anyway, sending Houston to Atlanta to face Florida State.

Apparently “Frank Beamer’s Last Game” was not a very appealing factor for the ACCs bowls at all. Virginia Tech fell out of the middle tier of ACC bowls, past the Military (which, in fairness, they played in last year) to the Independence. The Independence also effected a swap with the Cure Bowl, sending Tulsa to Shreveport and allowing the Cure to create perhaps the most depressing bowl matchup of all time.

— Fred Simmons (@fsimmons) December 6, 2015

Just wait the Smiths Bowl will be even more depressing. https://t.co/XNsTXoTpfn

— Matt Hinton (@MattRHinton) December 6, 2015

In general, I whiffed pretty badly on the ACC’s bowl lineup:

Game Prediction Actual
Russell Athletic North Carolina North Carolina
Sun Miami Miami
Pinstripe Pittsburgh Duke
Belk Virginia Tech North Carolina State
Music City Louisville Louisville
Military Duke Pittsburgh
Independence North Carolina State Virginia Tech

As I suspected from my research last night, the Texas Bowl did not get a Texas Tech-Texas A&M matchup. If you suspect that maybe TAMU and the SEC didn’t want that to happen, I’d suspect you’re right. Instead, Leonard Fournette will take aim at P.J. Daniels’s bowl rushing record of 307 yards.

And let’s close with what happened involving the Mountain West Conference. As I predicted last night, the Arizona Bowl was going to wind up matching two MWC teams because their only other option was to get a Pac-12 team, which they couldn’t afford. The conference’s commissioner was none too pleased about this. Yes, the system is broken. However, I can’t help but feel the NCAA let things get this way on purpose. A few years ago, the NCAA got out of the business of regulating bowl games other than a) controlling who can qualify and b) making sure the financials were in order. In other words, if you could afford to host a bowl game, then you can have one. To me, it seems more likely at this point that the playoffs will continue to grow, and that instead of going “back” to 30 bowl games (we’re at 40 now, not counting the national championship game) that the system will be scrapped all together. I think most of us that follow the game are in favor of an 8 or 16 team playoff. At 8 teams, bowl games start to get dicey. At 16, they would be untenable.

This is the 17th year I’ve done these predictions, and I like to think I’m reasonably good at it. For instance, last night when I was researching, I saw one sportswriter for a paper in Louisiana or some such toss off his “final” predictions. They were laughably horrible, even putting teams that had already accepted bids in the wrong games. I continue to do this because I enjoy it, and if bowl games were to go away, I’d miss this a lot. That said, I think it’s where we’re going (and where we should be going), and this year’s fiasco will probably help get us there.

Bowl Predictions 2015: Final

Okay, it’s the last predictions of the year! Get ’em right here!

Everything I said last week is mostly still applicable, so I will keep this mainly to anything that’s changed.

CFP

I’m sticking with my predicted Top Four, since there weren’t any major upsets in the conference title games. There was one major upset on the day, though: Texas defeating Baylor, which means the Big 12’s Sugar Bowl slot will go to Oklahoma State instead of the Bears. Bit of a bum rap considering the circumstances (essentially, Baylor ran out of quarterbacks), but them’s the breaks.

Power Five

I wound up doing a major reshuffling of the SEC’s bowl games, but I saw a fair bit of news from the past 24 hours that really suggested Tennessee to the Outback Bowl and Georgia to the Taxslayer Bowl, which caused a cascade through the other games. This has the effect of avoiding a Virginia Tech-Tennessee matchup in the Belk Bowl at least, since they will meet again September. However, this will likely also send LSU to the Texas Bowl, which seems to be agreeable to all parties except the Texas Bowl and Texas Tech, but again, the SEC gets to decide which bowls its teams go to after the Citrus.

Speaking of the Citrus, they could really shake things up if they decide they don’t want the punchless edition of Florida we’re currently getting, but I don’t think that’s likely.

There were some other slight changes due to the Big 12 reshuffling and any news I could glean from elsewhere, but I think these predictions are about as good as you’re going to get for the Power 5. The main remaining sticking point is where the the extra Pac-12 teams will wind up (and, indeed, which Pac-12 teams will be the extras). There’s one major problem, which I’ll get to below.

Group of Five

The other upset of the day was Georgia State defeating Georgia Southern, putting the Panthers in their first ever bowl game, the Cure Bowl.

So, About Those 5-7 Teams…

The 5-7 teams I wound up using are Nebraska, Minnesota, and San Jose State. The former two, I simply slotted into the Big Ten’s remaining bowl slots. Easy. San Jose State, not so much.

I wound up with a bunch of extra Pac-12 teams, a couple extra MAC teams, and an extra Mountain West team in the Spartans. The main issue that of the payouts. The director of the Arizona Bowl was quoted in saying that his first year bowl can’t afford the payout necessary to get a Pac-12 team. This means I couldn’t slot a Pac-12 team there. However, the extra MAC schools I had slotted into the backup bids that conference negotiated ahead of time. The result, then, is that I currently have Colorado State playing San Jose State. At least they didn’t play in the regular season. One solution is that the Arizona Bowl could trade a bowl slot with, say, a MAC-affiliated bowl, but the only MAC bowl out west that would make sense the Poinsettia Bowl, which already has a Mountain West school. This sort of thing has happened before, but a) it’s very, very tough for me to predict such swaps if no one is explicitly talking about them in the news and b) the Arizona Bowl is new and may not have the “pull” necessary to get someone to swap with them. So, even though it’s probably wrong, I’m going with that for now.