College football Week 5 is in the books and TheSportsNotebook’s college football coverage hones in on the 11 results of the most interest to anyone tracking the road to January and the teams that will play in the biggest bowl games.
We haven’t seen anyone clearly emerge as a candidate to be a BCS-buster on the major bowl scene, but with their 41-40 win over Boise on Friday night, Fresno has emerged as a team likely to get on the national radar between now and November.
Here are TheSportsNotebook’s updated BCS bowl projections after Week 3. The only change in the lineup is the removal of Wisconsin as one of the at-larges, after their 32-30 loss to Arizona State. I hate doing it for reasons that go beyond my personal affections for the Badgers.
The legal saying “The defense rests” applied on Saturday a lot more than fans in outposts like Columbia, Austin and South Bend would have liked. The defenses of South Carolina, Texas and Notre Dame were positively awful in big road losses that reshaped TheSportsNotebook’s BCS bowl projections. Here’s the rundown on the damage and the new-look bowl projections.
TheSportsNotebook’s college football coverage will have our BCS bowl projections after each week throughout the regular season. I prefer this methodology of tracking the top teams over and above rankings, because the latter tells us nothing about the matchups we’ll actually be watching in December and January.
There are, as you might expect, minimal changes in these projections, from what I had to start the season. The one change comes in the at-large area.
TheSportsNotebook has been on a boot camp run of college football coverage, having previewed all ten conferences and the major independents. With the season set to start on Thursday night, it’s time to summarize it all and make closing arguments.
The BCS bowl picture seems to have fallen into place, and not just at the top level, where wins by Notre Dame and Georgia sealed off any of the chaos prospects we talked about in this space last week. Not only the teams, but the matchups themselves look pretty clean and straightforward, as Oklahoma likely played its way into the final at-large spot when they beat Oklahoma State and Clemson fell at home to South Carolina.
In 2011, Alabama was given a second chance after an overtime loss at home. Is there a reason Oregon doesn’t deserve the same chance? In this article we’ll examine the Oregon Ducks BCS chances by comparing their body of work to Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. We’ll ask not only what will likely happen, but what should happen, with the overriding question being whether Chip Kelly’s team is getting a raw deal.
You know about the chaos that reigned on Saturday in college football, as Kansas State & Oregon fell, to the great benefit of Notre Dame, Alabama and Georgia, who now all control their destiny for the national championship. If the chalk holds for two weeks, we’ll see Notre Dame beat USC and take on the winner of the Alabama-Georgia SEC championship game. But what if the chalk doesn’t hold?
Alabama was the big loser on Saturday in their 29-24 loss to Texas A&M, falling from the #1 spot in the BCS standings down to #4 and putting themselves in need of substantial help to get back into the national championship picture. But there were other losers to. Let’s run through teams and conferences that are up against it, as we begin another round of BCS bowl projections.
Notre Dame & Alabama narrowly escaped with their unbeaten seasons intact. Nebraska narrowly escaped with its path to the Big Ten title still intact. Florida narrowly escaped with its path a BCS at-large spot still intact. But Boise State wasn’t so lucky. The Broncos lost late Saturday night at home to San Diego State, 21-19, and with the defeat saw their hopes of an Orange Bowl bid go up in smoke.
The month of October is in the books for college football and the crazy season is about to begin. November has a way of throwing a monkey wrench in everyone’s BCS bowl projections. From the strain of a long season to the challenges college kids have with keeping focus as media spin swirls around them to playing high-quality opposition looking to make a name for itself, November almost never goes as planned. Still, TheSportsNotebook is undeterred in making its BCS bowl projections five weeks from the finish line.