The invitations, they keep a-flowin’. The bowls are, as usual, here.

• Fresno State will head to the New Mexico Bowl.
• Southern Miss will represent C-USA in the New Orleans Bowl.
• Cal will probably head to the Emerald Bowl, while the winner of the Arizona State-Arizona game will go to Vegas. My questions is, what happens if Arizona loses? I assume they’re going to Hawaii.
• Rice is staying home and headed to the Texas Bowl. I’m surprised that they took Rice over Houston, but maybe that’s just me. Their opponent may be Notre Dame, for what it’s worth.
• It’s like 99% certain Nebraska will go to the Gator.

That’s all for now. Most of the action will happen on Sunday, so look for the final edition of these predictions very early Sunday. I’ll do one last sweep tomorrow night, watch Saturday’s games, and then do the last set before the dominoes fall.

A flurry of bowls have announced their bids or have tipped off the press of their intentions, so I’ve started marking predictions. As usual, the chart is here. A quick summary:

• Navy is going to the EagleBank Bowl in DC, but their ACC opponent is unknown. The December 20th date conflicts with Maryland’s exam week and rumor has it a deal with the Motor City Bowl is in the works.
• I was mistaken on Hawaii’s bowl qualifications, and they will be headed to their namesake bowl.
• Confirmed ACC activity: Georgia Tech to the Peach, North Carolina to the Car Care, Florida State to the Champs, and what may be the most surprising bid this bowl season, Clemson to the Gator. FSU seemed like an obvious pick for the Gator, but Clemson’s willingness to travel and hot end to their season must have weighed heavily against a FSU team that just got blown out by their rival.
• In other Gator news, indications seem they will take a Big 12 team this year. Provided they don’t announce before Saturday, I’ll change the Sun and Gator afterwards.
• A side effect of the ACC picks slotting into place already means the loser of the ACC title game will fall to the Music City Bowl to face either Vanderbilt or Kentucky.
• Lousisiana Tech accepted a bid to their local game, the Independence Bowl, which will need another at-large bid this year.
• I was expecting Big Ten bids to be announced already, but I guess there is still a question of whether or not Ohio State will get into the BCS.
• SEC upper-tier bids are no where near set. What I have are pretty much the best guesses of anyone, but there is some politicking going on, including Ole Miss trying to set up into the Capital One Bowl, which would send LSU to the Cotton, South Carolina to the Peach, and Georgia to the Outback.
• Though it’s not confirmed, it’s pretty likely BYU will go back to the Las Vegas Bowl.
• Confusion reigns in the world of Conference USA bids, since no one knows where the loser of the C-USA title game will fall.
• I didn’t really see any rumors of where Notre Dame might end up other than the Sun if some shenanigans happen in the Big East this weekend.

These are the penultimate bowl predictions in the predicting-who-goes-where phase. Next week I’ll try to take a more in-depth look at this next week. For now, here’s a quick overview.

• The SEC is going to send a very mediocre slate of teams to its bowls this year, which are (arguably) collectively the most high profile set of bowls of any conference. Alabama and Florida are both elite teams and will obviously end up in the BCS (more on that in a second, though) but after that it gets very dicey very quick. First off is the decided lack of Outback and Capital One Bowl stalwarts like Tennessee and Auburn. Georgia, expected to be among the elite this year (excuse me for a second: ahahahahahahahahaha) and in the Sugar Bowl has probably locked up the SEC’s best non-BCS Bowl (the Capital One) and will sport a 9-3 record and come off a loss. It drops off after that. The collective 3/4/5 picks (Cotton, Outback, and Peach) are particularly brutal. Ole Miss is probably the best looking team out of this group and they’re 8-4. I’ve slotted them into the Cotton. LSU and South Carolina are the only other teams with winning records, so they have to go to the Peach and Outback.
• So the BCS. Right now, if trends hold, we’ll have Alabama and Oklahoma in the title game. But what happens if Florida beats ‘Bama? Dr. Saturday points out it’s not necessarily automatic that Florida gets in. Even so the at-large situation is very important and rather confusing.
  Provided that Alabama and Oklahoma get in, then the Sugar and Fiesta Bowls get first crack at the other available automatic qualifiers and at-large selections. They’ll probably take Florida and Texas. After that, we go in reverse order and that is where it gets interesting. The Fiesta can basically choose from Cincinnati, Utah, or an at-large team (probably Ohio State). The consensus among many professional types and Utah message board posters is that Utah will go to the Fiesta due to travel concerns. I usually tend to take a pessimistic view of the BCS selection process, but the bowl commissioners have cooperated in the past (though not last year, though I suspect Hawaii probably would not have travelled well to any bowl). So while this set of predictions has Ohio State, I’ll probably change it in next week’s edition (if not before then). So then we go to the Sugar, which will probably be left with Cincy, Ohio State, or Utah to face Florida. If Utah does go to the Fiesta like everyone thinks, then they’ll take OSU unless they really want Boise State for some reason. End result? One boring Orange Bowl, most likely.
• Tech will go to the Peach or Gator unless they get a shaft-job of epic proportions.

Anyway, that took a lot longer than I wanted. Tune in later this week for my take on the last weekend of the regular season.

Okay, I’ve been a lot busier than anticipated, but I will scratch out a bowl predictions post right quick. I’m despairing because this all going to be a lot clearer after this weekend, especially with regard to the Oregon State situation.

• I finally bit the bullet and projected Oregon State to win the Pac-10, which causes Ohio State to miss the BCS and the Big Ten to actually fufill its bowl obligations.
• I put Oklahoma there before the BCS came out. There’s really no way to predict what the voters will do based on the results this weekend, though.
• I am stubbornly sticking to my guns regarding a Tech-Vandy Music City matchup.
• I apparently forgot to put someone in the Emerald Bowl. Just go with Hawaii, I guess. Oh, and ignore that Fresno State-Rutgers is a rematch. (I may correct these issues before I upload next week’s.)
• Somewhat Non-Obvious Matchup of the Week: None. I don’t see any non-high-profile game that intrigues me at all on this list.

Anyway, I will try to upload on Saturday night. My usual policy is to at least do the initial predictions before the bowls will have a chance to announce matchups. (A lot of bowls involving non-BCS conferences will probably announce their bids this week.) If a bowl extends a bid and I’m wrong, I will change the prediction of the other bowls involved with that conference. I don’t remember if I count any correct predictions that were changed during the week as “correct”, but we’ll see.

Once again, on the stage of history, this week’s bowl predictions. Commentary follows.

Oh, you can read them here.

• Tech versus Vandy may be optimistic hope more than anything else, but let me just throw this out here:
  

  Dear Music City Bowl,

  If you select the Georgia Institute of Technology to your post-season collegiate football contest, I will purchase a ticket for myself and several of my colleagues.

  Sincerely,
  ASimPerson

• Oh, I also suppose there’s a chance a Tech could end up just about anywhere in the ACC’s bowl hierarchy except for the Peach. I break it down like this. Wins against Miami and Georgia probably propel Tech all the way to the Gator. Win against Miami but a loss to Georgia puts Tech purely at the mercy of the bowl committees. I could see Tech anywhere from the Champs to the Car Care in that scenario, with a slight chance of having to go out west or to DC. 0-2 the rest of the way likely means the football team will need to start packing their bags for San Francisco. A loss to Miami but a win over UGA will probably just cause my brain to explode.
• Alabama and Texas Tech control their own destines. The 1-loss teams that have an inside track of are probably Texas and Florida. Oregon State has games with Arizona and Oregon remaining to settle the matter of the Pac-10.
• There’s now a glut of potential bowl eligible teams. I’ve listed the teams that are or might go 6-6 that didn’t get at-large bids at the bottom. The Big East will probably end up with 2 extra teams, which the Pac-10, Big 12, and SEC will all come up way short. The Sun Belt looks like a bunch of geniuses at the moment due to a pre-season deal that they would provide backup teams to three bowls, as this also gives their 6-6 teams priority over “true” at-large 6-6 teams.
• Somewhat Non-Obvious Matchup of the Week: Iowa-Mississippi. Not really a game I want to watch, but notable because who would’ve expected either of these teams to appear in the Outback Bowl back in August? Of course, both benefit from very strong teams at the top of their conferences that will get them 2 BCS bids.