The BCS bowl projections took their biggest shakeup of November this past Saturday. Even though the top two teams, Alabama and Florida State, held serve in blowing out no-name opponents outside their conferences, two shocking blowouts and a couple other modest developments have revamped the picture for the major bowls. What’s more, this past Saturday set the tone for perhaps a bigger debate ahead.
There are two weeks left in the college football regular season for the conferences that have championship games on December 7, and that includes everyone except the Big 12 and the Sun Belt. The college football Week 13 TV schedule has some excellent games, although unfortunately the three best are all back-loaded into prime-time. Let’s take a look at how the day will unfold across our TV screens.
The Pac-12 South is on the line Saturday night in Pasadena when Arizona State visits UCLA (7 PM ET, Fox). If the Sun Devils win they clinch the division and the chance to play presumably Oregon for the conference championship and Rose Bowl bid on December 7. If the Bruins defend their home field, they take the inside track and could wrap up first place a week later against USC.
The bright lights of ESPN Gameday are coming to Stillwater, where Saturday night’s Baylor-Oklahoma State game (8 PM ET, ABC) will be the showcase game of the week. And why not? The Bears are ranked #4, undefeated and still hoping to slip into the BCS National Championship Game. The Cowboys are #10, and in strong position to make it into the major bowls regardless of what happens on Saturday.
…now, improbably, it’s the Duke Blue Devils who are on track to earn the berth opposite Florida State in the ACC Championship Game.
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.
As things stand right now, both Fresno State and Northern Illinois are alive to be a BCS-buster and get a guaranteed slot in one of the major bowls.
Let’s take a look at each team’s chances of doing so, and begin by laying the groundwork. There are two ways that a team from the midmajors can be a BCS-buster. The first is to be ranked in the top 12. The second is to be ranked in the top 16, but ahead of at least one automatic-qualifying conference champion.
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.
Saturday in college football isn’t the most well-planned day when it comes to TV scheduling–the four best games of the day are all in the 3:30 PM ET time slot. But at least those four are all of significant magnitude, with implications ranging from the national title hunt to conference championships. TheSportsNotebook’s preview of college football Week 12 will open with this quartet…
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.