Get ’em while they’re fresh.

Reflecting the general lack of, well, anything in college football’s Week 12, there were a handful of changes, but not a lot at the top. I did shuffle around some CFP-controlled bowl spots, but nothing too major. I also brought the Texas-Texas A&M Texas Bowl back because I could.

There were scattered bits of news that I was able to find, the main thing being that Boise State will probably go to the Las Vegas Bowl if they win the Mountain West, which figures but last year they were allowed to go to Cactus Bowl to get a better matchup, so these sorts of things happen sometimes.

One other thing: I had 79 teams thanks to Florida State scheduling an extra game to get to 6-6, which I didn’t realize until I did all the predictions originally. I slotted them in, but I’d expect more accurate results next week. Until then!

They’re all right here. Let’s have a chat real quick about the logic this week.

Concerning the playoff, well here was my thought process. I have Alabama defeating Georgia in the SEC championship, Clemson defeating Miami, and Oklahoma defeating TCU or Oklahoma State. So there’s your top three. If Wisconsin beats Ohio State, then they’ll be in as well. But… what if they don’t? Obviously, if we’ve learned anything this season, counting on a particular version of the Buckeyes to show up for any game is fraught with danger, but nonetheless I like the Buckeyes to win. Surveying the other teams who would’ve just lost (like Georgia) versus the Big Ten champion, even a two-loss champion, well, it was hard to leave the Buckeyes out. Their reward, of course, would be getting to play Alabama, so good luck with that.

In other news, I just barely had enough teams. With the Big Ten still probably getting three teams into the Playoff-affiliated bowls, this leaves the rest of the Big Ten’s bowls sorely wanting. And that’s pretty much how you get UCLA in the Pinstripe Bowl. Elsewhere, I had to abandon my Texas-Texas A&M bowl game, but hey, there’s always next year (or next week).

Otherwise, things are getting progressively more real. Expect even more details next week, which is when I start looking for actual news to inform my predictions instead of, you know, guesses.

I’m just going to post the link because I am so very tired. Thanks for understanding. We’ll be back in force for the preview later this week and bowl predictions next week.

Week 2 of the predictions are hot-and-ready. I waited until after the release of the first Playoff Committee rankings, which I generally use to get an idea of how they’re thinking, at least at this early juncture.

It’s still a bit too early to get too far into the weeds on details, so let’s just hit the salient points for now:

• I’m predicting that Alabama defeats Georgia in the SEC championship, that Clemson wins out, Ohio State wins out, and Notre Dame wins out. Which put me in a bind for the last spot in the playoff. Notre Dame would have one loss, that 20-19 loss to Georgia back in September. Georgia would have that win, but also a very recent loss to Alabama in the SEC championship. Humans are prone to recency bias, which hurts Georgia’s chances, but (unfortunately) Georgia’s wins over Notre Dame and Auburn would be better than Notre Dame’s best two wins in this scenario (probably the wins over Southern Cal and NC State). 
• I actually did have 80 teams this time, which was nice. You can also see my running tally of eligible teams, and we’re already nearly halfway there.
• There are more than a few teams that will only have 11 games, and I wonder if worse comes to worse the NCAA will allow 5-6 teams to be picked ahead of 5-7 teams that get in on APR or if they’ll just still be eligible. (Of course, this never came up back when the season was only, you know, 11 games, but there were a lot less bowl games back then.)
• At least once each year I predict Texas and Texas A&M will play in a Texas-based bowl, and while I realize that it probably won’t happen, it’s fun to think about.

And… here we go again! The first bowl predictions of the season are here! Over the next several weeks, I’ll be doing my best to foresee where 80 teams will play football in the last few weeks of the year.

For the first edition this year, I got an assist from Bill Callahan’s S&P+ stat profiles. This saves me a good bit of time when it comes to handicapping the teams, especially at this point in the year when there’s still a lot of football left to be played. And indeed, it shows in the predictions. I was also short several teams, but upsets late in the year tend to help out in that department. In other words, no need to panic (yet).

Essentially, it’s still too early to say what’s what. Nonetheless, all the bowl information is there and correct to the best of my ability, but the predictions? Just for fun at this point.