The Army/Navy game concluded our college football regular season. As a result, it’s now Bowl season for the Football Bowl Subdivision. The table below shows all 38 games, along with each team’s SRS ratings, the average of the two teams’ ratings, and the difference between the two ratings.
Best Bowls
The Sugar Bowl, featuring Alabama and Ohio State, checks in as the best game of Bowl season, as measured by the average ratings of the two teams. The Crimson Tide have the best SRS rating, while Ohio State has the 5th highest rating.
The other playoff matchup comes in the Rose Bowl, but Florida State’s poor rating actually drops them game to #4 behind the Peach Bowl (TCU/Ole Miss) and even the Cotton Bowl Classic (Baylor/Michigan State).
The worst game? That’s South Alabama and Bowling Green in the new Camelia Bowl. Yes, the inaugural game of a new Alabama Bowl game featuring two six-loss teams will kick off at 9:20 on the opening night of Bowl season. Make sure you have your schedule cleared for that one.
Biggest Mismatches
Marshall and Northern Illinois face off in a game that, on the surface, appears to be a very good one. Marshall is 12-1 and a legitimately good team. On the other hand, while Northern Illinois is 11-2, a bunch of close wins against MAC teams doesn’t make UNI a good team. The Huskies lost by 38 against Arkansas and by 17 at home against a bad Central Michigan team. Northern Illinois is 12.3 points worse than Marshall in the SRS, which makes traveling to Boca Raton even more depressing.
Arkansas/Texas, Georgia/Louisville, and Louisiana Tech/Illinois are all 10-point mismatches, too. Of course, Bowl season has a habit of deviating from the regular season script, so don’t blame me when all the underdogs win. According to Vegas, the Foster Farms Bowl at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara is the most lopsided matchup. One reason for that: Stanford is the de facto host here, and the Cardinal are 14 point favorites against Maryland.
Most Competitive
Arkansas State and Toledo face off in the Go Daddy Bowl, which is the final Bowl game until the National Championship Game. You will want to get your last fix of college football regardless, but that actually projects to be a highly competitive game.
Even better is the Texas A&M/West Virginia matchup a week earlier in the Liberty Bowl. Like the Go Daddy Bowl, the favorite here is projected to win by 0.4 points, but these teams are much better. The good news: both games should be shootouts, as Vegas has the Over/Under at 67 for both the Go Daddy Bowl and the Liberty Bowl. This concludes the largest coverage of the Go Daddy Bowl you will see all week.
Come for the Nostalgia, Stay for the Points
Boise State played in the Fiesta Bowl at the conclusion of the 2006 and 2010 seasons, and both games (against Oklahoma and TCU) were outstanding. The Broncos bring a weaker team to Tempe this time around, but with Arizona on the opposite side lines, points will be plentiful. With an over/under of 69.5 points, this is projected to be the highest-scoring game of Bowl season.
Come for the Brands! Ignore Everything Else!
Penn State. Yankee Stadium. That sounds pretty good, and you can bet the attendance will rival what we saw with Notre Dame and Rutgers there last year. But this game should be horrible if you like something called offense: neither PSU nor Boston College are good at scoring, and the Pinstripe Bowl has a habit of looking ugly. The over/under here is 40, by far the lowest of Bowl season.
Notre Dame! LSU! Okay, the Music City Bowl may not be the Grandaddy of them All, but you do have two of college fotball’s biggest brands taking the stage. One problem: Notre Dame has lost 5 of 6 games, with the lone win coming against Navy. The Irish are not nearly as good as LSU, and this one could get out of hand early.
Life After January 1
The lower-tier Bowl games that take place after January 1 are usually reserved for some of college football’s weakest bowl-eligible teams. That makes the fact that Florida will be playing East Carolina in the Birmingham Bowl kind of incredible, and a good summary of the Gators season. One could say something similar about Oklahoma State: the Cowboys won 50 games from 2009 to 2013, but a 6-6 season in 2014 has left OSU playing in the Cactus Bowl on January 2nd.
The Cactus Bowl is not a new game: it used to be the Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl and before that, the Insight Bowl. Buffalo Wild Wings now sponsors the Citrus Bowl, so a new name was needed for the Bowl game in Tempe, Arizona. The game has historically been played at the end of December, but was moved to early January because…, well, I have no idea why and I’m not going to research it, either.
One potentially good post-January 1 game: UCLA and Kansas State in the Valero Alamo Bowl. It features a pair of SRS top 20 teams with 9-3 records. Four of those losses came at the hands of Oregon, TCU, Baylor, and Auburn. For lower-tier bowl games, this is as good as it gets.
Finally, let’s close with a final list of the SRS ratings.
