Fresh and hot here.

Here’s the highlights:

• I still don’t have enough teams, but I’m down to only two this week. I suspect we’ll get some upsets that will help shake things up. I’m still trying to figure out what the APR situation is for any 5-win teams.
• For now, I’m projecting Cincy into the top 4. I know I’m not the only one doing this, but my logic is essentially that a 2-loss non-conference champ Alabama isn’t going to get in. Normally I would wait for the CFP rankings to be released each week, but I’m trying very hard to get these out before the Tuesday MAC games, so I can only guess at their machinations.
• Just a reminder, with the number of bowls that are owned by ESPN Events (about half of them, especially pretty much every pre-Christmas bowl) there is a very high degree of guessing to all of this these days.

It’s that time again, folks. The first set of projections are here.

Here’s how this works. Each weekend from now until the end of the season, I project out every potential bowl eligible team. In the past, I had pretty much eyeballed this, but these days I now use SP+ to project each team’s final record.

I then attempt to determine the College Football Playoff controlled games based on their rules and precedents. Remember, my projections are attempting to extrapolate out from now through the last weekend of the season.

For non-CFP games, I attempt to apply each conference’s selection criteria to the bowls they are partnered with. Unfortunately, this is when the science starts to get very, very inexact. With the latest bowl deals that nominally took effect for the 2020 season, almost every conference has abandoned any sort of performance-based criteria for how their bowls are seeded. In addition, some conferences, especially in the Group-of-Five, have ceded almost all control of where their teams are placed to ESPN events, which owns about half of the bowl games.

This makes the call of which teams go where nearly impossible to predict anymore. Nonetheless, I will give it a shot and see if I can learn anything this year that I can apply to future seasons. I didn’t really do bowl predictions last year because half of the games were canceled and many teams opted-out.

An additional wrinkle for this week is that I am short five teams for all available slots. I will work in future weeks to determine what remedies may be available if this actually happens, but in the meantime any game that is lacking a team should have a “???” in at least one of its slots.

This is basically impossible this year. It was going to be hard enough with the new bowl contracts, where the conferences and ESPN are now leveraging more control than ever. But removing eligibility requirements takes it to a whole other level. Usually, I make a spreadsheet and predict which teams will wind up 6-6, and then try to judge how the various stakeholders might pick a team. Yeah, not in 2020.

So here they are, my best guesses heading in Championship Weekend. The table still needs some updates, but those likely won’t go up until after all the games have been announced. I will also be utterly shock if anything I predicted is correct, just because it’s almost all guessing due to the reasons mentioned above. But hey, I’ve been doing this since 1999, I can’t stop now.

Well, I stayed up late scouring the web for any news or hints as to how things will shake out this morning. My best guesses are here.

I’ll the hit high points:

• I think Wisconsin will fall behind Penn State and Auburn in the rankings and miss a New Year’s Six game completely.
• Consequently, I think the Citrus will pass up the Badgers to take Michigan to match them against Alabama.
• With 4 SEC teams in the New Year’s Six/Playoffs, that makes the lower-tier SEC bowls pretty nervous. I found at least one reasonably convincing article that indicated Navy would head to the Liberty Bowl, for example.
• I took that example even further, generally promoting AAC teams into missing spots and then using C-USA teams to fill in the AAC spots.

After I wake up in the morning, I’ll be trying to go through each announcement and re-arranging the dominoes for any picks I miss. As I’ve said before, the main thorn in my side while trying to predict these games is the bowls ESPN owns. ESPN can, has, and will move teams around to create more favorable matchups for TV despite whatever affiliations the bowl may actually have. The potential for weirdness is ripe.

Of course, my projections are also hosed if Wisconsin winds up in the Rose or Cotton Bowls. So we’ll see!

So I made some quick revisions based on how far the Committee dropped Alabama. Expect a full revision Saturday night/Sunday morning.