After three months of college football—three months of yawn-worthy blowouts and nail-biting thrillers—the impossible has happened.
There are 82 six-win teams this year—the exact number of bowl slots available.
Yes! This is every bowl projector's dream. It is a royal pain to have deal with either a) leaving out a six-win team, or b) picking an academically proficient five-win team. It feels ethically dubious to pick on New Mexico, but Hawaii's 38–30 win over the then-5-6 Lobos late Saturday did the bowl projection-industrial complex a massive solid.
Having sufficiently alienated Albuquerque, let's get to our last bowl projections of 2024. The AP Poll and College Football Reference's Simple Rating System are still being used as guides here even with conference standings complete—why? Beyond the obvious desire to use an up-to-date Top 25, the assumption is that bowl executives carry biases not dissimilar from sportswriters, and when in doubt will default to rudimentary metrics.
Injustices in the bowl selection process are relatively common. Why not build them into projections? Here are a final set of imperfect prognostications to end an imperfect year in an imperfect sport, with commentary to follow.
Notable Potential Bowl Matchups
We've hit basically every permutation in this space this season; still, here are a few new ones... Jacksonville State and Georgia Southern (Cure Bowl) are set to begin a home-and-home next year... First potential meeting for Arizona State and Penn State (CFP first round) since the 1977 Fiesta Bowl, and the first potential meeting for Ohio State and Tennessee (CFP first round) since the 1996 Citrus Bowl.
If Minnesota-TCU (Rate Bowl) has a whiff of familiarity, the Golden Gophers threw a huge scare into a No. 2 Horned Frogs team in 2015... Pittsburgh and East Carolina (Birmingham Bowl) is an alternate-history superconference matchup (as is Tulane and Syracuse in the Fenway Bowl, and Memphis and Boston College in the Military Bowl)... Let's hope everybody gets four downs in a Las Vegas Bowl between Missouri and Colorado... Connecticut is being sent to the Pinstripe Bowl to meet Nebraska here in a bid to create some regional interest; the Huskies' fate might be the most intriguing non-CFP question of this bowl season... Louisville beat BYU (Pop-Tarts Bowl) in the 2001 Liberty Bowl 28–10.
Should Alabama and SMU (Peach Bowl) meet, it would be their first meeting since the 1983 Sun Bowl, when the unranked Crimson Tide blasted the No. 6 Mustangs 28–7... The Buckeyes and Oregon (Rose Bowl) have met twice in that game and once in the national championship; Ohio State is 3-0 in those games... Oklahoma and Miami (Gator Bowl) is a branding-friendly #CollegeFootballHeritage matchup if ever there was one; the two teams have four meeting with both ranked under their belt... To single out a novel hypothetical semifinal matchup, Georgia and the Mustangs (Orange Bowl) haven't met since the Cotton Bowl of Dec. 1966—a 24–9 Bulldogs victory.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as College Football Bowl Projections After Week 14.
