The race for the Big Ten championship has been taking shape for a few weeks now, as Michigan State took steady hold of the race for the Legends Division title and began to look like a worthy sparring partner for Ohio State when the league crown is settled in Indianapolis on December 7. After Saturday, the Spartans’ steady hold on the division became a chokehold.
… it’s time to focus in more specifically on SEC bowl projections, and the team that lived through the most fluctuation–both in their own game, and with their fortunes in the Auburn-Georgia game–was the South Carolina Gamecocks.
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.
Florida now has to either beat South Carolina or beat Florida State. At least the latter is at home and it’s a big rivalry game where strange things can happen. But this would be stranger than strange, if the Gators can stop the Seminoles this year. And as unbelievable as it would have seemed in August, TheSportsNotebook’s SEC bowl projections with three weeks left in the regular season do not include Florida.
There’s a lot going in Big Ten football as everyone angles for position down the stretch. You’ve got a team fighting for a national title, another pushing for a major bowl bid, a division title still up for grabs and two teams fighting for their bowl eligibility lives. TheSportsNotebook breaks it all down as our Big Ten bowl projections are updated with three weeks to go in the regular season.
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,
The league has nine bids to fill, including the automatic spot in the BCS, which is the Orange Bowl, unless the champion (presumably Florida State) ends up in the national title game. If the ACC should get an at-large selection to the BCS, everyone moves up one rung on the bowl ladder and that means the conference needs ten teams to fill out its commitments.
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.
Within the Pac-12’s six contract bowls outside the BCS, there’s a another divide. The Alamo, Holiday and Sun offer the chances to play what should be pretty good teams from the Big 12 or ACC, giving a team the opportunity to end its season with a notable win.
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
…there’s angling for possible at-large spots to the BCS, to good New Year’s Day bowl games and to bowl eligibility itself. TheSportsNotebook’s college football coverage will touch on some key overview points and then make some Big Ten bowl projections.