Everything’s done now but the College Football Playoff.
Greetings, BBN!
Bowl Season is just about wrapped up now: all that’s left are for Ohio State, Texas, Notre Dame, and Penn State to decide a College Football Playoff. The conferences, for the most part, all performed pretty well (except for the ACC, of course, which helped everybody else by handing out wins left and right). Now, it is time to figure out our champion.
The American, putting eight teams into bowl season, was victorious in all but two games, posting a 6-2 record and a .750 winning percentage. The Big Ten and SEC, even if their teams win out, cannot catch the American in any scenario.
Notre Dame, however, still has one powerful card they can play to upend things: win the CFP. If the Irish win the national championship, the Independents/Pac 12—basically all the teams not in an FBS conference and playing for a conference championship on Week 15—will collectively have a better bowl record than the American.
Can they really win the Bowl Season Standings if they aren’t a real conference? Well, they will have played six games, going 5-1 in them. That’s enough results for a win percentage to count I think, and if the group of Notre Dame, UConn, UMass, Oregon State, and Washington State manages through the CFP to collectively go 5-1, I think that’s worthy of giving that group recognition as the winner of the Bowl Season Standings. We’ll see if Notre Dame can do it.
Here are our standings with just the CFP semifinals and championship to go:
College Football Bowl Season Standings
Notes:
- Conferences finishing bowl season with winning records: American, SEC, Sun Belt, Big Ten, MAC, and the lone wolves.
- The Big Ten or SEC will finish with the most overall wins this bowl season, with at least one of the conferences set up well to finish with 10 (or more!) total wins.
- Minnesota has now won eight straight bowls thanks to a 24-10 win over Virginia Tech in the Duke’s Mayo Bowl. It’s the longest active streak, and only six other schools have strung together eight or more in a row before. The longest is Florida State’s 11 from 1985 to 1995.
- If Ohio State plays Penn State in the national championship, it’ll mark the second time in this year’s CFP that two teams from the same conference have had to face each other, and in both instances, teams that faced each other in the regular season.