First off, once again, woo! We beat Georgia!

Second, we’ll have an unprecedented week 8 of predictions this year, since everyone is so tight-lipped this year. I’ll have a new set up next Sunday before the new rankings are released.

With that out of the way, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty.

Playoffs

I won’t post the image I’ve been posting again, but Miss State’s loss probably knocks them out of contention. My arguments for Baylor remain the same, but they definitely didn’t help themselves by struggling against Texas Tech on Saturday. I expect the committee’s top four tomorrow to be Alabama, Oregon, Florida State, and TCU. If everything goes as expected Saturday, the main question will be if a Baylor win over Kansas State is enough to lift them over TCU. I think it should be, but I’m not entirely sure it will be. I’ll have to make that call again next week.

The other teams in the top three also play this weekend, all in conference championship games. Oregon has a chance to avenge their loss to Arizona, and with a healthier offensive line and a now fully effective Marcus Mariota I’d say they’re poised to do just that. I don’t think Alabama will have any problem with Missouri. As for Florida State, well, anything can happen, huh?

As for the other committee-affiliated bowls, Georgia Tech is pretty much in the Orange win or lose in the ACCCG (unless the committee really lowballs our ranking). The Orange then needs to select the next highest-ranked SEC or Big Ten team, which I think is going to be Ohio State. The other bowls are pretty much a guess in terms of what the teams are going to be ranked and how the committee will match them up. Yes, that is still three SEC teams. Also, Boise State pretty much has the Group-of-Five bid sewn up with Marshall and Colorado State losing last weekend.

ACC

There was no news from any ACC school this week, but if Ohio State or Michigan State does indeed wind up in the Orange Bowl, this has the potential to trigger a situation where the Citrus Bowl must select an ACC team instead of a Big Ten team. This means I was able to slot Clemson into the Citrus instead of the Russell Athletic. I figure Louisville will slot above Duke in terms of desirability at this point. I then tried to place the above .500 teams next. Pitt’s upset of Miami also got them in, which means that if the Citrus Bowl thing doesn’t happen the ACC will have an extra team.

Big Ten

No news from Big Ten country either. Without the Citrus Bowl slot, I figure Wisconsin will get sent out west (that may happen anyway). This also has the knock-on effect of Illinois probably needing an at-large bid somewhere, but as an eligible team from a major conference they shouldn’t have an issue.

Big 12

The Big 12 is relatively easy. The only question is Texas-Texas A&M in the Texas Bowl will happen (probably everyone but the schools involved want it to happen, I’d guess), but that’s more on the SEC’s plate since there’s less play in terms of what Big 12 teams go where.

Pac-12

The Pac-12 is pretty easy as well, though there’s some question in terms of how many teams they can get in to the access bowls (i.e., it could be Arizona State or UCLA instead of Ole Miss). There’s some shuffling that may go on between the 7-5 and 6-6 schools, which a situation that will bear watching throughout the week.

SEC

Twelve of the fourteen SEC members are bowl eligible, and if the SEC gets three teams into the access bowls and/or playoffs, then they should be golden. Of course, an SEC team sure as heck isn’t going to be left out in the cold at the end of the bowl selection dance, but still. There is a bit of question of just where each team and the conference office will want particular teams to go at the end of the day. If you’re hoping against hope that Texas-Texas A&M will happen, then directing your prayers toward Birmingham on Sunday would be your best bet.

That’s about it. Tune in again late Saturday/early Sunday for my last stab at this before Sunday evening. Now that I think about it, this is a bit more like bracketology now, though at least we have a couple decades of precedent in terms knowing how the NCAA basketball tournament committee thinks.

They’re hot and fresh, that’s right, it’s another edition of bowl predictions.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t as much news as I’d hoped, mostly because a lot of bowls are apparently going to wait until December 7 to reveal their picks. Hopefully there will be some more news next week. Until then, let’s continue to speculate!

Playoffs

I have another helpful graphic:

It’s in alphabetical order this time, so it doesn’t reflect the current rankings or the order in which I do the conferences or anything. Based on this, I’d still generally agree that Alabama, Oregon, and Florida State are going to be the top three (but boy howdy are FSU making it hard on themselves).

The question, really, is that #4 slot. And I think there are four candidates:

• Mississippi State: the current leaders in the clubhouse, but I’m writing this before this week’s rankings. They can’t be real excited about Auburn, Ole Miss, and LSU’s play of late.
• TCU: currently ahead of Baylor, but that could change if Baylor beats Kansas State this weekend.
• Baylor: needs to beat Kansas State, but I think that point their win over TCU just has to count for something, right? We’ll find out in due time, I guess.
• Ohio State: sort of playing their way in, especially with Minnesota playing well. Problem for them is that they still sport by far the worst loss on this list, so they still need a lot of help.

I still like Baylor the best, but if they beat Kansas State like I project and then are still out next week, I will have to revise my predictions.

After that, I started trying to logically do the access bowl spots. It’s still a guess (other than TCU, Ohio State, and Mississippi State), but I did at least use this week’s rankings to get an idea. The question of how to treat championship game losers is still around, though, but that’s why I have things like Clemson in the Orange Bowl over Georgia Tech. (GT can do themselves a large favor by beating UGA, though.)

Other Things of Note

Let’s do this bullet-point style.

• Sorry, Marshall, but it’s just not going to happen. 
• That said, I’m going with Colorado State because they are a) currently higher ranked and b) have better wins than Boise. Problem for the Rams is still that pesky loss to Boise that will keep them out of the Mountain West title game. We’ll see what happens if and when the committee decides to rank either of them.
• Texas Bowl: Texas-Texas A&M. It has to happen. Has to!
• Speaking of former Big 12 rivalries, how about Missouri-Nebraska in the Citrus Bowl?
• It’s difficult to tell how teams that are going to fire their coaches will fare in the new bowl scenarios. I bumped Florida down because of this.
• I feel like I really need a year with this thing to figure out how it will shake out. Hopefully next year will have a little less uncertainty. 

The predictions are up. Let’s discuss them briefly.

The Playoff
Here’s that chart again:

This chart isn’t really in any sort of order. The predictions page reflects my final seeds. FSU is basically only in because I figure the committee will lend considerable weight to an undefeated schedule. If FSU loses at all their resume will put them definitively out. The fact that the team they play in the ACC Championship Game will have the best record of any team they face all season is a huge problem for the Seminoles.

At this point no team other than Oregon is going to get in from the Pac-12.

Overall, I don’t think there’s room for a two loss team unless all hell breaks loose, and well, that could happen, but I’ll deal with it if we get there.

I personally value the number of “good wins” above all else, so the seeds are a combination of what I think is important and what I’m guessing the committee will think is important. Since they haven’t shown a willingness to put FSU at #1, and indeed dropped them to #3 last week, I think they’ll be in the top four if they win out for sure, but anything other than that isn’t guaranteed. So I put them at #3, behind Alabama and Oregon.

Then the question is, who is #4? Your contenders are Baylor, Mississippi State, TCU, and Ohio State. This is a horrifically close call, but figures that in year one of this new thing we’ll already get a pretty strong case for an eight-team playoff. (Then again, that probably just means we’d be arguing about who #8 is.) I went with Baylor. The following arguments are in their favor: they’re co-Big 12 Champions with TCU, they beat TCU head-to-head, and also have the same good wins TCU has. I like them over Miss State and Ohio State because they have better wins than both (in TCU) and Ohio State’s loss to Virginia Tech becomes more inexplicable every week.

A lot can happen, though. Here’s each team’s remaining schedule:

• Alabama (projected #1): West Carolina (W), Auburn (I’m predicting a win), if they finish tied or better than Miss State, they will go to the SEC Championship where they will probably play Missouri or maybe Georgia. They will be favored against either, but neither provides a huge resume boost at this point. (Hey, remember that time Mizzou lost to Indiana? The Hoosiers are probably going to be transitive SEC East Champs.)
• Oregon (projected #2): Colorado (probable win), @Oregon State (probable win, but on the road in what is sometimes a wacky rivalry game), Pac-12 title game, probably against UCLA, but also could be against Southern Cal, Arizona St, or Arizona. For best win purposes, Oregon probably would prefer to face UCLA. Facing USC is probably the worst case.
• Florida State (projected #3): Boston College (probable W), Florida (probable W), Duke or Georgia Tech. FSU probably really wishes that Oklahoma State wasn’t have a down year, as that would really help them in the strength of schedule department. 
• Baylor (projected #4): Oklahoma State (probable W), Texas Tech (W), Kansas State (very tough W). TCU handled K-State pretty easily, but nonetheless that gives them the biggest potential prize on anyone’s remaining schedule. The flip side of that, of course, is that gives them the hardest schedule in this group.
• Texas Christian: Texas (probable W), Iowa State (W). Not much else to say about this one, but boy howdy did TCU make it interesting against Kansas last weekend or what? For now, I’ll chalk that up to playing a bit down to their opposition, but they won’t be able to get away with that against Texas.
• Ohio State: Indiana (W), Michigan (probable W), Big Ten championship game, probably Wisconsin. The Buckeyes stalled a bit against Minnesota last weekend, but they’ll be able to get things tuned again with their remaining regular season schedule. That said, I suspect they will really wish that, say, Baylor and FSU lose. Probably Miss State too, for good measure.
• Mississippi State: Vanderbilt (W), Mississippi (?), SEC championship only if they win out and Alabama loses to Auburn. The game against Ole Miss will be tough, but I have them winning it. Playing in the SEC Championship wouldn’t give them a boost in and of itself, it would just give them the title “SEC Champion”, which may count for a lot at the end of this thing.

As for the other “access bowls”, they remain a guesswork. East Carolina’s loss to Cincinnati last Thursday eliminated them from contention for a spot, so for now I’ve slotted Colorado State there. Who and where they will play remain a mystery to me.

Next week I hope that research will enable to start eliminating a lot of the guesswork, but with conferences holding more of the cards now, even the usual “representatives from these bowl games were there” articles won’t help as much as they did in the past.

Okay, the new predictions are up. Let’s do a quick overview.

The Playoff
So this is the scenario I was faced with when I was done projecting everyone’s record:

You can see what I wound up with on the page. I decided that taking the four best teams would be the committee’s top priority, and given that, I had to take Mississippi State over Oregon.

As for the other access bowls, this week I put Clemson in over Duke. With Auburn loss this past weekend, my projected loss to Alabama will give them three losses overall, and I think the committee will probably eschew 3-loss teams if there are enough 2-loss teams. So I matched Clemson up with Nebraska.

East Carolina is still my best guess for the Group of Five slot. They’ll have two losses but they will still have the best resume of any of the available teams. It pains me to see Marshall not get a chance, but those are just the breaks. (Speaking of Marshall, for the past few weeks I’ve tried to use the Heart of Dallas Bowl to give them a matchup with a major conference foe, but that may not work out if there aren’t enough Big 12 teams.)

The other access bowls were about matchups. I liked the idea of having a “Rose Bowl in Exile”, if you will, between Ohio State and Oregon, so I put that in Dallas. The Peach will wind up falling on the sword, as for lack of better ideas I gave them UCLA and East Carolina. Hopefully the next couple of weeks will clear things up on this front.

ACC
I’m now projecting Notre Dame to lose three games, which means they fall into the ACC’s bowl hierarchy. Notre Dame doesn’t get a lot of games against SEC teams, so I figure they’ll slot into one of the ACC’s matchups against a SEC team. In this case, I sent them to the Music City Bowl.

This causes headaches for the rest of the league, but in the end I was able to accommodate everyone. As a side note, I think this will be a very tough year for the Belk Bowl to get a North Carolina team, but then again the matchups are out of the hands of the bowls now anyway (for most conferences). With Utah slotting into the Sun Bowl, one of my goals was definitely to avoid a rematch of the 2012 Sun Bowl with them and Georgia Tech. Also, Miami went to the Sun Bowl in 2010, which is still relatively recent.

Big 12
Right now the Texas-Oklahoma State looks like it will determine which team gets to go a bowl game. Based on recent play, I picked Texas to go to… the Texas bowl.

Big Ten
I tried to avoid sending Rutgers to the Pinstripe bowl because they went there last year, and besides, I figure Penn State is close enough. (Also, Penn State fans should be happy about getting to go to any bowl, considering.)

Pac-12
I tried to create a Washington-Boise State matchup in the Las Vegas Bowl, except it causing other issues. I also then had the bright idea to look up Boise’s upcoming out-of-conference games, and sure enough they’re going to kick off the 2015 season against the Huskies. So that’s out.

Otherwise, with three Pac-12 teams getting into the Committee-controlled bowls that throws a bit of a wrench into the works. It’s worth noting that the way the whole thing is set up every year there will be at least one of the Power 5 conferences getting three teams in.

SEC
Missouri (you know, the team that lost to Indiana a while back) is probably going to win the SEC East, mostly because (like Duke in the ACC) they dodge all the contenders from the SEC West. Georgia, meanwhile, has a permanent rivalry game against what I’m sure will be a pissed-off Auburn team this coming weekend.

(Dear Mike Slive: before you retire, consider my advice. It would have really helped your conference this year!)

So what’s probably going to happen is this awkward situation where Missouri is going to get blasted by Alabama or Mississippi State in the SEC Championship game, but they’ll still be 10-3 at that point so out of obligation the Citrus Bowl will take them. Meanwhile, the SEC West, having beat each other up to the point where LSU and Ole Miss have three losses (and Auburn four) probably won’t send any more teams to the Committee bowls.

But hey, there’s still four weekends of football left to be played. A lot can happen, and this will probably all be different next week.

Okay, as announced previously the predictions are up. Since it’s so late in the week already I’m not going to go too deep into it this time, though there haven’t been any results that would change anything.

The Playoff
The one thing is that I don’t really care for waiting around until Tuesday for the CFP Poll to be released. Also, since I’m doing a predictive set of, well, predictions the poll doesn’t contain that much relevance to me.

What relevance I can try to glean, though, is perhaps how the committee thinks. Right now, the committee’s top 10 is:

1. Mississippi State
2. Florida State
3. Auburn
4. Oregon
5. Alabama
6. Texas Christian
7. Kansas State
8. Michigan State
9. Arizona State
10. Notre Dame

Which makes sense. The two undefeated teams are at the time, followed by a pretty defensible ranking of the 1-loss teams. I don’t think anyone is screaming bloody murder about this, except for maybe Notre Dame fans. (As the joke goes, though, Notre Dame’s best “win” might be their narrow loss to Florida State.)

So what can we tell, though? Well, most metrics have Mississippi State as a better team than Florida State. In fact, many advanced stats don’t think very highly of FSU at all. This definitely isn’t last year’s utterly dominant FSU team. Last year FSU had only one game decided by less than a touchdown: the win over Auburn in Pasadena.This year, they’ve had two, and Clemson took them to the brink. (If anything, Clemson probably should have won that game.) The main difference is the defense, which simply suffocated opposing offenses, while this year they have been slightly more porous.

That said, Miss State has been somewhat shaky since their dog became the top in college football. After a decisive win over Auburn in early October, the Bulldogs have since struggled a little with Kentucky and Arkansas.

But, again, these are major college football’s only two undefeated teams, and any poll conducted by humans is going to put them at the top. I can’t blame them for that.

And again, what I’m interested in is what will happen.

My prediction for the end-of-season top six is:

1. Florida State, as the only undefeated team left
2. Alabama, as SEC champions, having beaten Mississippi State and Auburn
3. Mississippi State, with their only loss being to Alabama
4. Oregon, Pac-12 champions and a win over Michigan State (and necessarily Arizona State)
5. Michigan State, Big Ten champions (best predicted wins: Nebraska twice, Ohio State)
6. Kansas State, Big 12 champions (best predicted wins: TCU and Baylor)

Obviously, a lot can change between then and now. But the conventional wisdom seems to be that the committee is valuing best wins over best losses, and if that holds, then I think my top six is reasonable.

Filling out the other “access bowls” remains difficult. I will probably switch out Clemson for Duke at some point. I still have East Carolina as the Group of Five representative, because I have no clue who to put there even though they lost to Temple.

I need to work on the weekend TV guide, so I will eschew the conference breakdowns this week.