We at SB Nation love bowls for one simple reason: they're college football games. If there were fewer bowl games, there would be fewer college football games before the eight-month offseason void. We welcome bowls of all shapes, sizes, locales, and levels of importance. You don't have to watch Utah State vs. UTEP, but we damn sure will.
Still, there are watchable bowls, and there are less watchable bowls. I'm here to help you differentiate.
To me, there are four things that make for watchable bowls: quality, evenness, excitement, and happiness. (You could throw in familiarity -- like Utah playing Colorado State or Texas playing Arkansas -- but once the game starts, it has to be watchable.) Using statistical tools, let's measure the watchability of 2014-15's 38 bowl games, sans the national championship game.
Quality
I'll measure quality by adding together the F/+ ratings of each bowl's participants.
By setting the bar at six wins, the sport obviously opens the door for some poor teams to go bowling. In fact, two teams ranking worse than 100th in the F/+ ratings -- No. 101 Fresno State and No. 104 Bowling Green -- drew bids. But that's the price of doing business. If we want as many bowls as possible, we're going to let in some bad teams.
In terms of combined quality, here are your top five bowls:
1. Alabama vs. Ohio State
2. Oregon vs. Florida State
3. Ole Miss vs. TCU
4. Mississippi State vs. Georgia Tech
5. Michigan State vs. Baylor
And here are your bottom three:
36. Nevada vs. UL-Lafayette
37. South Alabama vs. Bowling Green
38. Fresno State vs. Rice
Evenness
We want competitiveness. No matter what bowl game Alabama is in, the combined quality is going to be high. But if the Tide played Fresno State, that wouldn't be very watchable.
To measure evenness, we'll look at the difference in F/+ ratings between the two participants. This will tell us which games are most likely to go down to the wire. For instance, Rutgers (minus-4.4 percent, 73rd) and North Carolina (minus-4.5 percent, 74th) might not seem like exciting combatants, but they have played at the same level for the season as a whole. That might be watchable!
Here are your top five games in F/+ evenness:
1. Rutgers vs. UNC
2. Ole Miss vs. TCU
3. Western Michigan vs. Air Force
4. BYU vs. Memphis
5. Missouri vs. Minnesota
And here are your bottom three:
36. Arkansas vs. Texas
37. Houston vs. Pittsburgh
38. Marshall vs. Northern Illinois
Excitement
We all have our own ideas of what makes for exciting football games. Some people like slug-it-out, three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust football. There's a place for that, but when we don't have an invested interest in one team, sometimes we're just looking for more visceral excitement, like tempo and big plays.
To measure excitement, I'm going to look at the combined rankings for each team in two fun measures: tempo and havoc. For tempo, let's use the Adj. Tempo measure found on the Football Outsiders Offensive S&P+ page. For havoc, of course, there's the Havoc Rate measure found on the Defensive S&P+ page. Tackles for loss and interceptions are fun. Hurry-up offenses are fun.
Here are your top five games in combined Havoc and Tempo rankings:
1. Michigan State vs. Baylor
2. Ole Miss vs. TCU
3. BYU vs. Memphis
4. Boise State vs. Arizona
5. Oklahoma vs. Clemson
And here are your bottom three:
36. Maryland vs. Stanford
37. Navy vs. San Diego State
38. Miami vs. South Carolina
Happiness
Bowls bring together teams that are ecstatic about going bowling and teams that have no interest in continuing their season.
Let's rank happiness by comparing bowl teams' current F/+ ratings to their preseason projected ratings. Which bowls feature overachievers? Which feature teams that had far greater visions for 2014?
Here are your top five games in terms of happy overachievers:
1. Western Michigan vs. Air Force
2. Ole Miss vs. TCU
3. Mississippi State vs. Georgia Tech
4. Alabama vs. Ohio State
5. Utah vs. Colorado State
And here are your bottom three.
36. Fresno State vs. Rice
37. South Alabama vs. Bowling Green
38. Washington vs. Oklahoma State
That the Russell Athletic Bowl, which features sad, angry Oklahoma, ranks only 20th proves that the measure is flawed. Alas, we'll go with it.
Bowl watchability rankings
So here are your combined watchability rankings. I applied different weights to each category: Quality was given 4x weight, Evenness 3x, Excitement 2x, and Happiness 1x.
Date | Game | Quality rank | Difference rank | Excitement rank | Happiness rank | Total rank | |
12/20/2014 | New Mexico | Utah State-UTEP | 35 | 35 | 26 | 23 | 38 |
1/2/2015 | Armed Forces | Houston-Pit | 28 | 37 | 30 | 34 | 37 |
12/20/2014 | New Orleans | Nevada-ULL | 36 | 27 | 29 | 32 | 36 |
12/26/2014 | Heart of Dallas | Illinois-Louisiana Tech | 31 | 33 | 34 | 6 | 35 |
12/27/2014 | Independence | Miami-South Carolina | 18 | 34 | 38 | 33 | 34 |
1/2/2015 | Cactus | Washington-Oklahoma State | 30 | 26 | 23 | 38 | 33 |
12/23/2014 | Poinsettia | Navy-San Diego State | 29 | 24 | 37 | 19 | 32 |
12/29/2014 | Liberty | Texas A&M-West Virginia | 23 | 30 | 32 | 29 | 31 |
12/20/2014 | Camellia | South Alabama-Bowling Green | 37 | 20 | 10 | 37 | 30 |
12/24/2014 | Bahamas | CMU-WKU | 33 | 17 | 33 | 15 | 29 |
12/30/2014 | Foster Farms | Maryland-Stanford | 16 | 32 | 36 | 30 | 28 |
12/24/2014 | Hawaii | Fresno State-Rice | 38 | 13 | 13 | 36 | 27 |
12/26/2014 | Quick Lane | Rutgers-UNC | 34 | 1 | 35 | 35 | 26 |
1/4/2015 | GoDaddy | Toledo-Arkansas State | 32 | 21 | 9 | 27 | 25 |
12/29/2014 | Texas | Arkansas-Texas | 17 | 36 | 22 | 13 | 24 |
12/23/2014 | Boca Raton | Marshall-NIU | 22 | 38 | 8 | 10 | 23 |
12/27/2014 | Pinstripe | Boston College-Penn State | 21 | 31 | 20 | 7 | 22 |
1/2/2015 | Taxslayer | Iowa-Tennessee | 26 | 19 | 15 | 26 | 21 |
1/3/2015 | Birmingham | East Carolina-Florida | 24 | 22 | 11 | 25 | 20 |
12/30/2014 | Music City | Notre Dame-LSU | 11 | 29 | 21 | 31 | 19 |
12/27/2014 | Military | Cincinnati-Virginia Tech | 19 | 23 | 16 | 24 | 18 |
12/26/2014 | St. Petersburg | NC State-UCF | 27 | 8 | 17 | 28 | 17 |
12/20/2014 | Las Vegas | Utah-Colorado State | 15 | 15 | 28 | 5 | 16 |
12/30/2014 | Belk | Georgia-Louisville | 6 | 25 | 27 | 9 | 14 |
1/1/2015 | Rose | Oregon-Florida State | 2 | 28 | 24 | 22 | 14 |
12/20/2014 | Potato | WMU-Air Force | 25 | 3 | 18 | 1 | 13 |
1/2/2015 | Alamo | Kansas State-UCLA | 9 | 7 | 31 | 18 | 12 |
12/27/2014 | Sun | Arizona State-Duke | 12 | 12 | 18 | 14 | 11 |
1/1/2015 | Citrus | Missouri-Minnesota | 14 | 5 | 25 | 12 | 10 |
1/1/2015 | Outback | Auburn-Wisconsin | 8 | 18 | 14 | 16 | 9 |
12/31/2014 | Fiesta | Boise State-Arizona | 13 | 14 | 4 | 17 | 8 |
12/27/2014 | Holiday | Nebraska-USC | 10 | 9 | 12 | 21 | 7 |
12/21/2014 | Miami Beach | BYU-Memphis | 20 | 4 | 2 | 11 | 6 |
1/1/2015 | Cotton Classic | Michigan State-Baylor | 5 | 16 | 1 | 8 | 5 |
12/29/2014 | Russell Athletic | Oklahoma-Clemson | 7 | 6 | 5 | 20 | 4 |
12/31/2014 | Orange | Mississippi State-Georgia Tech | 4 | 11 | 6 | 3 | 3 |
1/1/2015 | Sugar | Alabama-Ohio State | 1 | 10 | 7 | 4 | 2 |
12/31/2014 | Peach | Ole Miss-TCU | 3 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 1 |
As one would expect, January 1 is loaded; of the five New Year's Day bowls, four rank in the top 10, and the fifth (Oregon-FSU) is a national semifinal. That's an awesome day.
But December 31 packs even more punch. Ole Miss vs. TCU could be the best game of bowl season, MSU-Georgia Tech is a study in contrasting styles and happiness, and Boise State-Arizona grades high in exciting play. All three rank in the top eight.
But you don't have to wait until December 31 to get your fill of fun football. December 20, bowl season's opening Saturday, features two top-16 games (and two bottom-three games), and BYU-Memphis could be the best pre-Christmas bowl. And hey ... there's at least one not-awful post-January 1 bowl (KSU-UCLA), right?
So there you have it. Science tells you not to miss Memphis-BYU and to stay home on New Year's Eve.