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And then there were nine.
With Vanderbilt, Tennessee and Arkansas all losing on Saturday, the SEC only has nine bowl-eligible teams and cannot get any more teams to six wins.
Missouri capped a rally from a 1-5 start to win its fifth consecutive game, routing Vanderbilt in Nashville. The Tigers (6-5) will take their place in the SEC’s bowl lineup and coach Barry Odom deserves major credit for it.
But that result left the Commodores 4-7, along with the Volunteers and Razorbacks. The latter two are toast because their Academic Progress Score, the measure by which the NCAA permits 5-7 teams to go to bowls, does not favor them even if they win their finales.
As for Vanderbilt? We already covered this topic, but basically even if Vandy defeats Tennessee next week, the Commodores will still need a lot of help to reach a bowl at 5-7.
At the moment I’m projecting 77 teams at 6-6 or better for 78 spots in this year’s 40 bowls (again, the 40th bowl is the national championship game between the two winning College Football Playoff semifinalists). Air Force, with an APR score of 995, gets first crack if the Falcons (4-7) defeat Utah State next week.
But even if Air Force loses, the much bigger problem for Vandy resides in the Power 5. Duke earned its fifth victory on Saturday and Minnesota already has five. Both have the same APR score as Vandy, 992, but are ahead in the tiebreaker (most recent score).
So, it’s not impossible for Vandy to get into the bowl picture with a win, but it is becoming difficult.
There are already 70 teams with six or more wins, leaving eight bowl spots open. There are four more guaranteed six-win teams because four matchups next week involve two 5-6 teams playing each other: Indiana at Purdue, California at UCLA, Colorado at Utah and Old Dominion at Middle Tennessee State. That makes 74 teams with six or more wins, so at most there will be four openings. Aside from the eight 5-6 teams involved in those four games, there are 10 other teams with five wins — and that does not even take into account a handful of 4-6 teams which have two games left.
What else happened Saturday? Nothing, really. A bunch of blowouts, whether conference games or not, with Texas A&M-Ole Miss and Mississippi State-Arkansas the only games having anything resembling drama. So nobody moved in our projections, except Vanderbilt moved out. Oh, and let’s have a Texas-Texas A&M rivalry renewal in the Texas Bowl, because what’s life without a little whimsy?
Longtime newspaper veteran Jim Tomlin is a copy editor and writer with SaturdayDownSouth.com.
