Category: Uncategorized

December 20

New Orleans Bowl: Nevada vs. Louisiana-Lafayette, New Orleans, La., ESPN, 11 a.m.

New Mexico Bowl: UTEP vs. Utah State, Albuquerque, N.M., ESPN, 2:20 p.m.

Las Vegas Bowl: Colorado State vs. Utah, Las Vegas, 3:30 p.m.

Famous Idaho Potato Bowl: Western Michigan vs. Air Force, Boise, Idaho, ESPN, 5:45 p.m.

Camellia Bowl: Bowling Green vs. South Alabama, Montgomery, Ala., ESPN, 9:15 p.m.

December 22

Miami Beach Bowl: BYU vs. Memphis, Miami, ESPN, 2 p.m.

December 23

Boca Raton Bowl: Marshall vs. Northern Illinois, Boca Raton, Fla., ESPN, 6 p.m.

Poinsettia Bowl: Navy vs. San Diego State, San Diego, ESPN, 9:30 p.m.

December 24

Bahamas Bowl: Western Kentucky vs. Central Michigan, Nassau, Bahamas, ESPN, Noon

Hawaii Bowl: Rice vs. Fresno State, Honolulu, ESPN, 8 p.m.

December 26

Heart of Dallas Bowl: Illinois vs. Louisiana Tech, Dallas, ESPN, 1 p.m.

Well, the latest rankings experiment has more or less concluded.  So I won’t beat that horse here.  But how would a 16 team tournament really look in a more practical world?  So as a fun cross check, I messed around a bit:

• I aggregated three publicly available rankings.  Kenneth Massey and Jeff Sagarin‘s computer ratings along with the AP Poll.  Normalizing, racking and stacking them – you get something like this – I only rank the top contenders and the conference champs to get to a list of contenders for the national title (scale 0 to 1):
  1. Alabama – 1.000
  2. Oregon – 0.966
  3. TCU – 0.899
  4. Ohio State – 0.892
  5. Florida State – 0.877
  6. Baylor – 0.873
  7. Mississippi State – 0.830
  8. Michigan State – 0.815
  9. Ole Miss – 0.812
  10. Kansas State – 0.732
  11. Georgia – 0.731
  12. Georgia Tech – 0.694
  13. Arizona – 0.673
  14. Auburn – 0.663
  15. UCLA…