With 35 bowl games, you’d think every bowl-eligible team could be accommodated, but that was not the case this year. Eighty schools were eligible, meaning that 10 were guaranteed to get left out in the cold. As expected, all of them (Central Michigan, FAU, San Jose State, South Alabama, Texas State, Toledo, Troy, ULM, UTSA, Western Kentucky) came from mid-major conferences.
Sun Belt Conference offered to pay bowl games to take its football teams
The little guys got squeezed out of the postseason, and nobody felt the pinch more than the Sun Belt.
The power conferences each are allotted the bulk of the bowl slots -- they all have at least seven tie-ins -- but even so, they can still finish with a surplus of eligible teams. The ACC (eight tie-ins) alone has 11 eligible teams; the Pac-12 (seven tie-ins) finished with nine. When there are situations like this, teams that don’t make the traditional conference lineup generally trickle down to other games as at-large bids.
Surpluses happen in the lower-profile leagues too, but power-conference schools usually get those at-large bids ahead of their mid-major counterparts, which is one reason why so many schools from the MAC, Sun Belt and Conference USA didn’t get the opportunity to play in the postseason. Those conferences ended up with a lot of eligible teams -- the MAC and Sun Belt had seven, while C-USA finished with eight. Between the three, they have just 11 tie-ins, and there’s the problem. With twice as many eligible candidates as guaranteed slots, a lot of those teams, inevitably, were going to get squeezed.
Last year, 9-3 Louisiana Tech missed out on a bowl trip, but that was its own fault.
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