Bowl Projections 2011: Which Teams Are Headed Where This Season?

Championship Week is upon us! Let’s hop right to the bowl projections. As always, the results below are based on this week’s Momentum Rankings.

In accepting a bid to the Poinsettia Bowl, Louisiana Tech joins BYU, UL-Lafayette and Arkansas State in securing their bids.

Well that didn’t take long. A week ago we observed that the only things standing between college football and sheer chaos were Les Miles’ team and Les Miles’ old team. By Friday night, his old team had fallen in Ames. Hello, pure, unadulterated ridiculousness.

Notice I said “ridiculousness” and not “chaos.” Technically, that’s because the chaos has already taken place. Because not only Oklahoma State, but also Oklahoma lost last weekend -- both in games called by Joe Tessitore, which is the funnest tidbit of all time -- the BCS title picture has actually become quite clear. It’s everything after the BCS title game that has gotten murkier.

If you think using the BCS standings is an awful way to decide who plays for the national championship, you have no idea. There’s something far worse: Using the BCS Standings to decide who plays for the conference championship.

Here are the complete Week 13 BCS standings.

A week of utter BCS chaos did not leave the lower bowl games unaffected, but at least the carnage was more subdued. We even got a measure of stability, with both BYU and Arkansas State already accepting bowl bids. Only ... yeah, still almost 70 more to go. But it’s a start.

A handful of conferences will be taking more or less than their share, and slotting teams into other conference’s positions goes beyond the available calculus and enters the realm of psychology. But wheeeeeee!

Three Saturdays remain in college football’s regular season, but while we were anticipating chaos and BCS Armageddon a month ago, we are now resigned to a simple fact: if LSU and Oklahoma State win out, they are playing in the national title game.

Sure, there are some roadblocks along the way -- LSU still has to face a top 10 (if slightly overrated) Arkansas team and, potentially, a smoking hot Georgia team in the SEC title game. Oklahoma State, meanwhile, will have two weeks to prepare for (and overthink) the Bedlam battle to end all Bedlam battles on December 3. Plus, they must overcome some potential Tessitore magic this Friday night when they face Iowa State in Ames; seemingly every Friday night ESPN game Joe Tessitore does, ends up exciting and close.

One thing we didn’t do: presume Penn State won’t be invited or will choose to decline an invitation. Remember, three days ago it looked like PSU might need to cancel games. After watching Saturday’s game against Nebraska, dropping that game would’ve been a terrible idea. Who knows, but let’s give it time.

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Using this week’s momentum ratings as a guide once again, let’s look at how the bowls might take shape if the hotter teams stay hot and the colder teams stay cold. As you’ll see below, we have a situation. The Momentum Rankings lead us to the following turn of events:

Think about what that means for a moment. You’ve, then, got LSU in the national title game versus ... who, exactly?

Certain bowls are starting to take shape, such as the Orange Bowl and others with autobids for conference champs, while others remain all over the place. This week’s bowl projections by and ESPN’s Brad Edwards and Mark Schlabach, Scout.com, and CollegeFootballBowlProjections.com:

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Alabama, as expected, dropped only one spot in the Week 11 BCS Standings after its “Game of the Century” loss to LSU on Saturday night. But the Crimson Tide shouldn’t get too comfortable just yet.

An Oklahoma State loss is far from the only thing ‘Bama needs to earn a rematch with LSU in the BCS national championship game, even if that seems to be the case according to the latest standings. Stanford is at No. 4 and poised to make a move, if it can get by No. 7 Oregon next week in a huge Pac-12 showdown on the Farm.

November means three things: turducken, Daylight Savings Time and bowl projections. It is time for me to unveil Vol. 1 of my own projections, though as with my weekly Heisman Watch column, I wanted to do things a little bit different. Instead of just looking at the rest of the games, making quick predictions and plotting out the bowls, I wanted to use two fun little tools in the arsenal: Adj. Score and momentum.

I wanted to utilize Adj. Score in the same way I did for last week’s Undefeateds column, and I wanted to more heavily weight recent results. Teams like TCU and Nebraska have built momentum in recent weeks while teams like Florida, Texas A&M and Tennessee are deflating. You can see the entire list of teams ranked by hotness (or notness) here. Some of the rankings are surprising (Army, UCF), some not so much (Alabama, Kansas).