The college football regular season is in the books for most conferences, with only the Big 12, Sun Belt and American Athletic having regular schedules next week. The rest of the nation is moving on to conference championship games. Let’s take a look at how the BCS bowl projections are shaping up.
The BCS bowl projections took their biggest shakeup of November this past Saturday. Even though the top two teams, Alabama and Florida State, held serve in blowing out no-name opponents outside their conferences, two shocking blowouts and a couple other modest developments have revamped the picture for the major bowls. What’s more, this past Saturday set the tone for perhaps a bigger debate ahead.
As things stand right now, both Fresno State and Northern Illinois are alive to be a BCS-buster and get a guaranteed slot in one of the major bowls.
Let’s take a look at each team’s chances of doing so, and begin by laying the groundwork. There are two ways that a team from the midmajors can be a BCS-buster. The first is to be ranked in the top 12. The second is to be ranked in the top 16, but ahead of at least one automatic-qualifying conference champion.
Two of the results from college football Week 12 tweaked and reshuffled TheSportsNotebook’s BCS bowl projections, but the biggest result was the one that had no impact in the end, and it was Auburn’s stunning 43-38 win over Georgia.
Baylor can’t just think about the national picture though, because there in the midst of a hot race for what would be their first conference championship since 1980, when the program was still in the old Southwest Conference. The Big 12 also has a good shot at gaining a second bid into the major bowls, and finally there’s a race for the league’s top non-BCS game, the Cotton Bowl, which offers the opportunity to play a high-level SEC opponent.
The race for the BCS National Championship Game became crystal clear in Week 11 of the college football season, as there’s now no doubt that Alabama and Florida State are on a collision course to met in Pasadena for the title. Style points no longer matter for these teams, only winning football games.
There still remains a lot of interesting dynamics going on underneath the surface though,
Central Florida hosts Houston on Saturday night (7 PM ET, ESPN2) and the winner will hold the inside track to the outright conference championship and the BCS automatic bid.
Week 9 of the college football season is in the books and that means it’s time for updated BCS bowl projections. The most notable developments this week were as follows…
TheSportsNotebook’s college football coverage has been doing BCS bowl projections all year, and now have something substantive to go on. The first edition of the official BCS rankings are out
As we update the BCS bowl projections following the results of Week 7 it seems that both nothing has changed and that everything has changed. The actual matchups that are projected have changed very little, but the landscape has changed dramatically in a way that seems poised to eventually seep up to the surface. The four most notable developments would be the following…
TheSportsNotebook’s BCS bowl projections have been impacted by the narrow escapes of Saturday, none of which ended in upsets, but a couple of which required a re-evaluation at the top of the Pac-12.
College football Week 4 is in the books and the BCS bowl projections have been duly updated. TheSportsNotebook’s college football coverage has gone deeper into eleven games from this past Saturday that are worthy of the attention of BCS bowl game trackers, and now it’s time to see how the field shakes out and what matchups that creates.