Reminder: Since this is the final week, the regular season is over (as are conference championship games). The actual final BCS rankings will not be available with sufficient time before the bowls are actually announced for me to do a write-up tomorrow, so there's more guesswork involved than usual in terms of current ranking, though there are no more future games to guess the outcome of.

After final giving up on some things I'd projected for most of the year happening, it looks like they either did or might have happened -- Oklahoma State's blowout of Oklahoma makes a non-rematch title game a very real possibility, and Houston's loss may have allowed TCU to sneak in. On the other hand, Clemson and Wisconsin won the ACC and Big Ten title games, respectively, proving me wrong there.

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Sorry for being late this week; Thanksgiving travel and general malaise delayed this writeup a day. Since the regular season (except for the Army-Navy game) concludes this weekend, and the final BCS standings will be announced at the same time as the bowl pairings, there will be no 'if the season ended today' projection next week, and I'll try to have the pure projection up as soon as possible. At this late a date, there's not a lot of difference here, mostly just the fallout of Oklahoma State probably beating Oklahoma and LSU probably beating Georgia.

As much as I would love to project anything other than the dull inevitability of an SEC rematch, this week we're going to have to.

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All projections below are solely the opinion of the author. Projections should not be taken as an indication the author has the slightest idea what will happen in college football this season, because he does not, and neither does anyone else. Therefore projections for this week will assume the chaos continues, because no one outside of Alabama wants to see an SEC rematch for all the marbles, and at this point it seems as good a guess as any.

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So two more undefeated teams fell this week, one of which I expected (Stanford) and one which I didn't (Boise). Oddly, that -- and other games this week that led me to adjust my projections -- created a surprising degree of agreement between 'if the season ended today' and the projection.

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As projected, LSU won the game of the century of the week. What wasn't projected was them doing it in a game that no matter how much SEC types will tell you was a display of amazing defense, was really only slightly less ugly than the scene in Hartford. Chaos reigns in the Big Ten. Oklahoma State also managed to narrowly avoid being upset by Kansas State.

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A few more undefeated teams went down, Stanford suffered a near miss, Wisconsin lost a second time, and there was that horror show at Papa John's Cardinal Stadium. Nonetheless, the projections march on.

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Okay, a fair amount of BCS chaos this week, even ignoring what happened in the Dome Friday night.

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This year I've decided to combine my 'Bowl Projections' series with my 'If the season ended today' series, both to cut out the redundancy between them and because I think that by having them both in the same article, I can better explain the difference between the two. The disadvantage of this is that the combined article can't be out until the BCS rankings are out.

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Well, this is the last conference, home of the wild, wild west.

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With this installment, we head west, and get our second-to-last conference for this project. Home of the Air Force flexbone, Pitt's last coach, and June Jones.

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As I mentioned in the last entry, breaking up the MAC was a bit tricky, mostly because there were so many schools in Ohio. Here's what was the 'MAC-North' on my working spreadsheet...

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In this installment, mid-major land gets a bit more interesting, as we find the fate of two Big East refugees and one school that wants to join us so badly it's kind of creepy.

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The minor conference part of this series is somewhat hit or miss. The first entry had a few interesting teams and some exciting games. The second one features, well, schools that shouldn't be playing I-A football (even if one of them thinks they should be in the Big East, and another was once part of a major conference).

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Today starts the mid-major portion of the series, where the existing conferences (and their predecessors) often had little to tie them together in the first place beyond rough geography (and sometimes not even that). So the post-16pocalype alignments are based more on location than anything else.

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Like the previous installment of this series, this one features a conference returning to a lineup that it had for what seems like forever (at least to someone who might have been alive for a few years in the 1970s, but certainly doesn't remember anything from then). But it's the last major conference to cover, so here goes...

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This installment and the next are the most predictable entries in this series. You know exactly what you're going to see here. However, for completeness, we've got to, so here goes...

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Although you can make a case that most of the members of my new Big East, ACC, SWC, and Big 9 are better off than they were before (or at least no worse off), and as you'll see later, the new Big Ten and Pac 10 are what they've been for most of their existence. But that means someone suffered a bit, and due to last-mover disadvantage in my post-16pocalypse collapse of the super-conferences, this was the SEC.

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I'm kind of jumping around in this project to do all the 'interesting' conferences (which is to say the major conferences where the alignment I'm putting things in didn't exist in 1990) first, and today's entry is an old school / new school hybrid from the plains and mountain west.

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With the third installment of the series, I'm bringing back another conference from the dead (though this one actually is dead now, instead of just being presumed dead like Big East football would be in the event of the 16pocalypse).

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For the next entry in my series, I'll look at how the ACC reacted to the end of the super-conference era -- and its northern half leaving to be part of the re-imagined Big East.

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To kick off my series, I'll start with the conference that most of us here at TNIAAM care most about, and that would probably disappear as a major football conference during the 16pocalypse. Fortunately, in my world, it comes back better than before.

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With all the talk flying around the internet about Texas A&M and the SEC, and my long-held opinion that super-sized major football conferences are unsustainable, I figured now was as good a time as any to start a series I've been working on for a while.

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Since it's almost time for the big event at MSG, I was wondering what the rest of you guys think of the current format. I'm not a big fan.

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Lots of upsets, but not the one I expected. Late this week due to holiday madness.

(boilerplate for this series follows)

This series, unlike my Bowl Projections series, is based on the current BCS standings, and my estimation of how bowl selection committees would react to the current standings if they were present at the end of the season. In my estimation, what bowls value is, in order

1. Protecting relationships with conferences
2. Out of town fans in the seats
3. Local fans in the seats
4. TV viewers
5. Novelty
6. Providing a good game

However, the bowls have various agreements to take certain teams under certain rules, so Ohio State and USC don't just play in the Rose Bowl every year no matter what happens in the regular season.

Unless it's extremely improbable (or impossible) that the highest-ranked team in the BCS standings can win a conference, the highest-ranked team in a conference is considered its projected champion in this series. 

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Okay, I didn't expect much of what happened this weekend. Only one more of these this season.

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Few changes in the top 10 (only loss was Nebraska; the top 3 teams did not play), so again only small changes this week.

(boilerplate for this series follows)

This series, unlike my Bowl Projections series, is based on the current BCS standings, and my estimation of how bowl selection committees would react to the current standings if they were present at the end of the season. In my estimation, what bowls value is, in order

1. Protecting relationships with conferences
2. Out of town fans in the seats
3. Local fans in the seats
   
4. TV viewers
5. Novelty
6. Providing a good game

However, the bowls have various agreements to take certain teams under certain rules, so Ohio State and USC don't just play in the Rose Bowl every year no matter what happens in the regular season.

Unless it's extremely improbable (or impossible) that the highest-ranked team in the BCS standings can win a conference, the highest-ranked team in a conference is considered its projected champion in this series.

Continue reading this post »

This is up later than usual because thinking about college football since last evening has just been depressing. Nonetheless, this series must go on. So...

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No changes in the top 10 in the BCS rankings means very little change this week, though one change will be obvious to readers of this blog, and the other one was a shift in my thinking on how at-large BCS teams will be selected this year.

(boilerplate for this series follows)

This series, unlike my Bowl Projections series, is based on the current BCS standings, and my estimation of how bowl selection committees would react to the current standings if they were present at the end of the season. In my estimation, what bowls value is, in order

1. Protecting relationships with conferences
2. Out of town fans in the seats
3. Local fans in the seats
   
4. TV viewers
5. Novelty
6. Providing a good game

However, the bowls have various agreements to take certain teams under certain rules, so Ohio State and USC don't just play in the Rose Bowl every year no matter what happens in the regular season.

Unless it's extremely improbable (or impossible) that the highest-ranked team in the BCS standings can win a conference, the highest-ranked team in a conference is considered its projected champion in this series.

Continue reading this post »

A lot of close calls at the top this week, but the only projected BCS game participant from last week to lose was Pitt. The Panthers still control their own destiny in the conference, but almost certainly will not win the conference if they lose again (there are ways where it's possible, but Pitt can't win a 2-way tie against a 5-2 USF, WVU, or UConn, and probably loses a 3-way tie that goes to the BCS rankings because they'd be 7-5). Also, the way some other games played out has me changing my projected champions for the Big Ten and Big 12.

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