If Buffalo, Toledo and Eastern win, there will be 6 7 and 5 teams. Not sure we get an inviation at 6 and 6.
If Victory’s post above is true, no problem getting in with 86 openings, 6-6 gets you in.
Which is as clear an indication as there is that there are too many bowls and that the dumbing down of expectations that making a bowl is a big deal is like the artificial belief in inteligence advanced by grade inflation. Going .500 isn't that big a deal. It's not a winning season or a losing season.
I think that there are 78 slots....Someone correct me if I am missing something.
I totally get the too many bowls argument. I would understand cutting it back so only conference champs and/or top 15 teams make it. What I don't get is the people who want to cut out 10 to 15 bowls so there are only 50 or 60 slots. Is there much difference between team #60 and team #80? And when we are deciding WHICH of the eligible teams is sitting home there is no committee doing intense analysis as there is for playoff inclusion. Inclusion doesn't have anything to do with which team is most deserving. It has to do with TV ratings and which school is 100 miles away from a bowl site instead of 1000 miles. The argument that we need to cut out a few bowls so that a few MORE teams can be left out by purely arbitrary measures that have nothing to do with merit is just ludicrous.
Let's cut back to 10 or 15 bowls and allow the playoff committee to decide who gets them or let's keep 39 or 40.
You’re closer than I was, there are 80 slots I think, not 86 as I stated above
There are 78. The two slots in the national championship game are filled by teams from other bowl games.
Colorado State was eliminated last night, so that's one less potential 6-6 team.
Bowl participants have never been decided by which team was most deserving. It's all about tie-ins and, more recently, TV ratings. For decades the B10 sent only its champion to a bowl game -- the Rose Bowl. Back then they had ten teams and they played only eight conference games, so each didn't play all the other teams in the conference. If they had co-champs, just one went. As I recall one year they had co-champs that went undefeated or had only one loss each. So one co-champ stayed home while two- or three-loss teams from other conferences went to a bowl. Even in the '90s some 6-5 teams from "P" conferences went to bowl games while seven-win teams from other "P" conferences stayed home.