We could still play in a bowl. Both ways it could happen would require something bordering on a miracle. One way is to actually win the MAC which is still mathematically possibly but a hundreds to one shot. The other way would be to win the final two games, there not be enough bowl eligible teams to fill all of the bowls, and have the highest graduation record of all of the 5-7 teams. I haven't checked on what the chances of the latter happening are but I expect that it is not very likely.

A lot of the prior 15 years Ohio was sitting at about 6-4 this time of year, and since we know that if 3 6-6 teams are sitting home 1 is very, very likely to come from the MAC, the Bowl Projection pages and likely number of eligible teams was a topic of conversation every year. This year it has been largely ignored because Ohio started 1-7.

Teamrankings uses its computer rankings to put a percent chance for each team to win a future game. Once you have that you can easily determine the chances of a team finishing with a certain number of wins. This is the same sort of math that they use to give us a 0.1% chance of winning the MAC Championship which I have shown is pretty consistent if you use the game winning percentages from FPI and Massey. You can see that for every team here:

https://www.teamrankings.com/ncf/projections/standings /

I added these and get an average of 80.75 eligible teams. Now THAT'S interesting. If the math is right it means that there is a slightly better chance of a 5-7 team going bowling than not and a outside chance of two or three. I don't know what they graduation rates of other potential 5-7 teams are and there are a lot of possible combinations of who the 5-7 schools can be and how many might go bowling. I know that historically our graduation rates have been very good so it isn't unthinkable that it could be us.

The math here is harder to do for me to put reasonable odds on it than a MACC but I suspect that OUr odds of getting a bowl that way are still pretty unlikely but much better than winning the MACC. We still have to win both games and that's about 3:1 against as we'll be about as big of an underdog at home against Toledo as we will be a favorite on the road against BG. It looks like a 5-7 team getting to go bowling is around 1:1. We would still need to beat the other 5-7 schools on the NCAA's graduation metric. I honestly don't know how to think about odds on that. Anyway, this is maybe only a 15:1 shot against us getting a bowl overall if I had to put a number on it. That's unexpected. The fact that Joe Tansey picked us to go bowling makes me think that he might have researched grad rates and that if there is a 5-7 team going and we win out that it is likely to be us and maybe the odds are even a little better than that.

The article didn't have Toledo going to a bowl. The Rockets are 5-5 and have at Ohio and home vs Akron on their schedule. So apparently they're saying either Toledo will lose out, finish 5-7 and be passed over for a 5-7 Ohio team, or a 5-7 Ohio team would be picked ahead of a 6-6 Toledo team. The only way the latter would happen is if Ohio breaks a 53-year losing streak and wins the MAC championship, a very remote possibility. It would be fun to see and all of us (well, most of us) could die happy. But I'm not planning to be smiling just yet.

Out of the other teams with 7 losses Ohio has likely the best chance of winning out since its final two opponents are two MAC schools with losing records in Toledo and BG.

Realistically there is a chance to go 4-8, the program has had at least 4 wins since 2003 which has become the marker for an off year.

Finishing 5-7 and making a bowl has an outside chance, unlike winning the East which requires every game to break the right way.