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 first big night of college basketball is set to go on Tuesday, with a great doubleheader from Chicago featuring four of the best teams in the country, and our first look at the some of the most hyped freshmen leading up this year’s one-and-done class.
The winless teams get on the board, the bottom falls out of the bottom of the AFC playoff race and the NFC East continues to wallow in a hopelessness that makes mediocrity seem like a description overly kind. But the biggest development of NFL Week 10 was a pair of clutch road wins by a pair of teams whose stock is on the rise…
The drama is heightened by the fact that none of the teams control their own destiny. Here are the four, with their conference record and remaining ACC games…
Baylor can’t just think about the national picture though, because there in the midst of a hot race for what would be their first conference championship since 1980, when the program was still in the old Southwest Conference. The Big 12 also has a good shot at gaining a second bid into the major bowls, and finally there’s a race for the league’s top non-BCS game, the Cotton Bowl, which offers the opportunity to play a high-level SEC opponent.
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,
Jimmie Johnson is closing in on the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series championship after his clutch win in Texas last Sunday moved him to a seven-point lead over Matt Kenseth. But there’s still two races left and no one knows better than Johnson how a steady lead can fall apart on Phoenix International Raceway, where the circuit heads for Sunday’s Advocare 500 (3 PM ET, ESPN).
NFL Week 10 is a strange week for CBS to have the doubleheader. The network carries the AFC, and the four teams with byes include two of the AFC’s best (New England & Kansas City) and two of the AFC’s surprise playoff contenders (Cleveland & NY Jets). But when you have Peyton Manning in your conference, there’s going to be game worth watching, and Denver-San Diego leads up the TV schedule in the late Sunday afternoon slot.
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.
College football Week 11 is marked with good games all over the TV schedule, and some big ones at night. Maybe it’s a good thing that Oklahoma-Baylor and Oregon-Stanford go down on Thursday night, because even without the week’s two biggest games, Saturday is still stocked. Here’s how the TV schedule breaks down…
Thursday is going to be a great night to be a sports fan, as the daily sports TV schedule is awash with great games, and it starts with a big college football doubleheader.
