Every Saturday during the regular season there are dozens of games going on, so many even the most die-hard can't imbibe them all. Not so for the bowl games. College football weans you off slowly, sometimes with only one game per day. This, of course, is followed by a burst on New Years Eve and New Years Day games. One last binge before another slow drip of a select few culminating in a championship game.
Not only do I love bowl games, but I love them in the inverse way most fans do in that the less significant the bowl, the more I'm interested. The New Mexico Bowl, for instance, pits a Conference USA team against a Mountain West foe. The victor gets what I think is one of the coolest bowl trophies - a hand-painted piece of pottery that is unique to the teams playing that year:
On the other end of the spectrum for the last two seasons I've sat having diarrhea (perhaps from the chili?) while listening disinterestedly as Clemson and Alabama squared off. In between volleys of torso bending pain wishing I had the remote with me, "Hey maybe there is a college basketball game on. Oh God, not another Taco Bell commercial."
I don't like Clemson, and I don't know why even, before their most recent success. My running theory is without fail they blew up my College Pick'em on an almost yearly basis. Alabama is more of a boredom issue, I respect them but don't like Saban, but who does outside of the half of Alabama who doesn't root for Auburn. What I'm getting at is, if the National Championship is the pinnacle, the most-watched bowl you'd think that would be the most interesting to me, but the opposite is true. The teams that just scraped in at the bottom of the bowl game barrel are what do it for me. Did they back in after a great start to the season and are going to come out flat due to disappointment? Did they overcome a bad start and sneak in via a field goal in overtime against their biggest rival and are stoked? Did their coach get fired? Did their coach get hired by another team? In either case will the kid's rally and excel or pout and fizzle? So many variables, so much volatility.
And of course, since we are dealing with college-age males there is always the chance that they get in trouble at whatever sunny locale their bowl is at, save of course for the Potato Bowl played in Idaho,..in January...on a blue field...Never thought about it before but maybe the field is blue because it's so cold? Somebody get that field a sweater!
Another fun twist was the recent emergence of the Bahama's bowl, sidelines reporters always talk about schools scrambling to get all the players passports, to the Bahama's, you're an 18 to 22-year-old male,...and this may be your only chance to leave the country how cool is that?
Tangent time...I think it would be cool if someone like Warren Buffett ponied up the cash and started a "Nebraska Bowl" played in Memorial Stadium. "The Greatest Fans?" Prove it by coming out to see 6-6 Delaware A&M vs 7-5 Northeastern Alabama State in December.
Since I'd be running the bowl game I'd get an awesome warm cozy suite or whatever so don't worry about me, I'd be fine. I'll be more worried about the attendance or lack there-of and spilling nacho's on the expensive suite seats which will undoubtedly happen anyway.
Yes my friends, that's what I'd do if I had that kind of money, of course, that might be why Buffett is rich and I'm not, he makes better choices and most likely doesn't spill greasy stadium food on himself.
As I have done throughout my life, I'll do the next best thing, pretend. At the culmination of this bowl tracking (I hope to have additional blogs as the season goes on), I'll be looking for the Bowl Eligible but not Bowl Invited teams and pick two, if there are two. Several years ago not enough teams made it to 6 wins so the NCAA delved into weird criteria to pick "the best" 5-7 teams. I don't remember and I don't want to look up what that criterion was but I'm pretty sure academics was the determining factor WHICH I LOVED. "Academics is important to NCAA.....but only if you're 5-7....."
All of what you kind souls are reading was brought about by my recent discovery of https://www.teamrankings.com This site offers for free what I've tried to various extents over the years to do on my own, track each team's progress towards a bowl game. I feel bad I didn't find this site until the regular season is half over, but this is better than nothing. I only have one real problem with their current projections, but we'll get to that when we get to that.
Without further delay, we start at the top, and not unlike my interest in the bowls themselves, the earliest bowl-eligible teams are usually the biggest yawners. In most cases, if for some reason some of these teams "only" got bowl eligible their coach would probably be fired.
Two things jump out here, UAB who shuttered their entire football team only a few years ago, Phoenix-ed the whole thing and are at six wins after seven games. I'm not sure if they're bowl eligible or not technically though. There might be a probationary period due to their recent resurrection.
SMU, who only a few years prior, had it's own famous football alumni suggesting the University shut down the entire football program due to decades of mostly poopiness. That's some next-level fandom there "We're so bad I don't think our team should exist anymore, I'm not even exaggerating." Now SMU is undefeated.
Next comes the teams that are right at the door, and most of which will be bowl eligible by this time next week. Here we start to see that behind the HTML, some rounding is taking place and some OCD is being triggered within me.
Notre Dame and several others (in Green) are listed at 100.00% although TeamRankings.coms percentages appear to be rounded to the nearest tenth of a percent. Yes, it is VERY unlikely that Notre Dame will lose all of their remaining six games but not impossible, less than .049 % maybe, but still, that is still not zero. In other words, we're way at the end of the curve but not touching the line.
In Yellow, we see the one team I have a problem with. At first glance, I thought this was just bad math or Missouri was playing such a gauntlet of teams for the remainder of the season such as Alabama, Georgia, Auburn, etc. I even looked up their remaining opponents, as you can see, with Arkansas and Tennessee, they were never in the less than 1% round down amount.
Turns out Missouri is in the NCAA's timeout chair for being naughty. As a result, the Tigers are bowl banned this year. The problem I have is this should be noted somehow, or at least have the percent changed to n/a to give me pause so I don't have to google it mid-blog on a whim and almost embarrass myself further by going on a rant about how they almost certainly will get to 6 wins. I'd be curious what their percentage would be if they weren't experiencing the ban. I guess judging by Missouri's 0%, my uncertainty about UAB (100%) has been quelled sufficiently.
Next, we have things starting to get interesting, despite very similar records the percentages are a very broad range from Michigan State's 98.6% to Boston College (BC's) 31 % chance.
BC's percent is what makes this site's info so worth it to me. I would normally have seen 4-3 and thought: "they only need two more, they should have a good shot" or at least 50% but now that the numbers are crunched for me lets look at Boston College's remaining schedule just for fun-sies. That last sentence was something I never envisioned typing. BC to me is the epitome of ACC boredom and disinterest. Other teams include Syracuse, Pitt, and I'm sure I'm missing others but they apparently are so uninteresting I can't even remember them.
I'm not sure where this disinterest comes from. These teams have done nothing to me. They are college footballs equivalent of going on a date and not connecting with that person. I'm sure they're nice, I'm sure my mom would like them but there just isn't that spark....anyway, Boston College:
We live in strange times my friends, BC's best chance for a win comes against once-mighty Florida State. They are given a paltry 1/2 % change against unchallenged ACC bully Clemson.
And now onto the teams two steps from Bowl Eligibility:
And now onto the teams two steps from Bowl Eligibility:
Speaking of long off-seasons, another plus to the bowls (at least to me), is that only at college football's highest division do half the teams that make the postseason, end said season on a positive note. I like that, most people don't, that's okay, they can always watch the movie where the kid licks a frozen metal pole for the 1000th time instead. That or partake in the pointlessness of regular-season college basketball, and don't get me started on the NBA...
Anyway, onto what I call the "Halfies" three wins and three more needed:
The percents are even wider here, from the low 90's to UTSA's 1.4% chance. Love it! This is the knife's edge people! These are the teams I'm watching, as strange as that may sound to most people, even fellow College Football fans. How cool would it be seeing the Texas San-Antonio Road Runners in a bowl game after being given a 1.4% chance?
On to the teams whose chances are dwindling, even the very best are below 35%:
On to the teams whose chances are dwindling, even the very best are below 35%:
Not a lot of note here, but we do see what I believe is the lowest possible threshold on the site in Arkansas's 0.1%.
Next, are the teams on the ropes, the teams with no room for error. I highlighted Northwestern because they interestingly have a rather high chance (for this group at least) of still making a bowl, their remaining schedule reflects this, not bad for a team who has only won one game so far this season.
Next, are the teams on the ropes, the teams with no room for error. I highlighted Northwestern because they interestingly have a rather high chance (for this group at least) of still making a bowl, their remaining schedule reflects this, not bad for a team who has only won one game so far this season.
Last is the zombie teams, already over the 6 loss threshold for making a bowl, but still have a chance to rise from the dead should not enough teams become bowl eligible as described above. Rice looks good here should that happen, as only at this level of suck-a-tude does the NCAA factor in academics.
They are all listed at 0%, but we're talking extremely small chances here, the difference in the chance of winning the lottery between buying a ticket and not buying one at all, lots of zero's people.
With that I will leave you, because I started this blog on a Thursday evening on a whim, this was rushed and since starting Houston and SMU have already played, but I'll come back and fix things as needed, consider this an alpha release. The next installments will be more streamlined due to skipping over all the parts about justifying my bowl fetish.
They are all listed at 0%, but we're talking extremely small chances here, the difference in the chance of winning the lottery between buying a ticket and not buying one at all, lots of zero's people.
With that I will leave you, because I started this blog on a Thursday evening on a whim, this was rushed and since starting Houston and SMU have already played, but I'll come back and fix things as needed, consider this an alpha release. The next installments will be more streamlined due to skipping over all the parts about justifying my bowl fetish.
