Right now a bowl cannot take a team unless it has a 6-6 record or better. This December a bowl could be in a situation where it has to petition the NCAA for a waiver to take a 5-7 team.Apparently, the NCAA is worried about "litigation in case there aren’t enough teams with at least six wins to fill the bowls."
In the event that there were to be a shortage of bowl eligible teams, common sense says the bowls that would be most at risk would be:
- Bowls with "at-large" tie-ins
- Bowls that pick at the bottom of their conference tie-in pecking order
- Bowls with the smallest payouts
- The least prestigious bowls
| Bowl | Affiliations | Pay Out Per Team |
| PapaJohns.com Bowl (B'ham) | CUSA vs. Big East #5 | $300,000 |
| Armed Forces Bowl (Ft. Worth) | MWC vs. Pac 10 #6 | $750,000 |
| Sheraton Hawai'i Bowl | CUSA vs. WAC | $750,000 |
| Las Vegas Bowl | Pac 10 #4/5 vs. MWC #1 | $1 million |
| New Mexico Bowl | MWC vs. WAC | $750,000 |
| St. Petersburg Bowl (New) | Big East vs. CUSA | TBD |
When the music stops playing and the last two bowls go looking for a dancing partner, who gets the shaft? ESPN will be right there battling for the final teams, and they don't exactly fight fair.
Up Next: The Most At Risk Bowls....
PWD
10 comments:
I know my math sucks but if there are 68 teams needed and only 60 potential teams? doesn't that mean four bowls could be SOL?
Why do you think you'd only have 60 teams eligible? If you had enough REALLY bad teams, you could have a few extra 6-6 teams.
Last year, there were 67 teams with 6-6 or better records. Based on a quick skim of the list from last year.
Hey, we might as well make everything like the NBA playoffs -- you know, where 80% of the teams make it.
Ridiculous.
So now we get a few more hours of college football no one other than the fans for those respective schools are going to watch. Rewarding mediocrity in the form of sending a 5-7 or 6-6 team to a bowl game only further dilutes the bowl season currently in place. I fully understand there are a lot of factors at play here with money being right at the top, but college football is going in the wrong direction here in my opinion.
You know, I like football. I'd watch almost any two college teams play. Who does it hurt to have more bowls? It's a free country - if ESPN or whoever wants to take the risk that it's gonna get left holding the bag at the end of the year, who cares? That's how fortunes are made my friends. It's called a calculated risk. And ESPN is undeniably good at it.
I wasn't thinking about even records, or playing FCS teams. I figured half the 120 would have a winning record and half would have a losing record. I told you my math sucks.
I seem to recall there has never been a year when there were not 60 teams who were .500 or better.
Half the teams will not have losing records. Think... a team that goes 0-12 covers that.
Just to add to my earlier comment (had to leave for a bit).
I have no problem with bowl games. I love bowl games. I bet I have only missed 2 or 3 over the past 3 years. The beauty of sport is that you never know what you are going to get. The games EVERYONE thinks will be a great game more often than not turns out to be a bad one (blow out, sloppy play, etc). Then you get an Alamo Bowl game that ends up being really good. (Or the Fiesta bowl game between OU and Boise).
Sometimes the lower tiered bowls are more fun because the teams are really fighting hard to finish the season on 1) a winning note and/or 2) with a winning record.
Bring on the bowls! Remember football is cyclic, UGA could one day be back in the 7-5 range and playing in the Congressional Bowl. At least then Adams would not be throwing a multi-million dollar party.
What harm does it do to you if a 6-6 team is playing the Emerald Bowl. Does it really diminish anything? Does it cost you anything?
If some company (Disney in the case of ESPN) wants to own the bowls and show them, then fine. Heck, remember back when Ted Turner owned the Braves and TBS--it was the same thing. The Braves provided programming (and for much of that time the Braves were horrible).
I will make an even more radical proposal: screw the 6-6 rule. If a bowl wants to invite a 1-11 team or a 3-8 Notre Dame, let them. It is their bowl.
Perhaps there will not be enough teams to fill the bowls. A bowl (and ESPN) will sue in court that the NCAA is violating anti-trust laws (remember that case!). I bet the NCAA could lose that one since it does not run the bowls.
For the playoff advocates could then convince the NCAA to take over running the championship for D1 and you would get your playoff. The bowls could then be the NIT.
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