There are so many college football bowl games that the NCAA decided this year to put a moratorium on adding more of them. The country’s 128 FBS teams spend the year vying for spots in one of 41 bowls, ranging from the New Year’s Six and College Football Playoff semifinals to the likes of the AutoNation Cure Bowl in Orlando.
How college football conference bowl game tie-ins work
The single most important thing to know: it’s rarely tied to the conference standings. But there’s a lot of other stuff going on, too.
Dale Zanine-USA TODAY Sports
The first step is figuring out who’s bowl-eligible. Basically, every FBS team that wins at least six games is eligible (only one win against an FCS team counts toward the six, and if a team plays 13, it’s supposed to need seven wins, but these days, teams with two FCS wins or 6-7 records can usually still get in). When there aren’t enough 6-6 teams to fill out the 41 bowls, some 5-7 teams get bids based on the NCAA’s academic progress standings.
While it would make sense for the country’s top 12 teams to get slotted, in order of prestige, into the New Year’s Six bowls, that’s not what happens. Nor do the sport’s lesser bowls take teams simply according to how good they are. There are rules.
Almost every bowl has conference tie-ins.
Conferences negotiate bowl partnerships before seasons begin, usually years in advance, but actual team matchups usually aren’t determined until the Sunday after conference championship weekend.
The games without any conference ties are the Playoff bowls and, in this year’s rotation, one of the other New Year’s Six games. This year, that means the Peach, Fiesta, and Cotton Bowls are open to all.
The Playoff semifinals will be determined by the Playoff committee, with the No. 1 seed meeting the No. 4 seed in whichever semi is closer to its campus. (For example, Alabama would rather host in Atlanta than in Arizona.)
The Rose, Sugar, and Orange take the conference champions or next-highest teams from their associated conferences, and the Cotton gets the top-ranked mid-major champion and the top-ranked at-large.
After that, everyone joins in. Here are the basics (the number next to a conference’s name indicates that bowl’s spot in that conference’s picking order and does not necessarily correlate to conference standings):
| College Football Playoff | |
| Fiesta Dec. 31, Glendale, AZ | Playoff rankings top 4 |
| Peach Dec. 31, Atlanta | Playoff rankings top 4 |
| National Championship Jan. 9, Tampa | Fiesta winner vs. Peach winner |
| Other New Year's Six games | |
| Rose Jan. 2, Pasadena, CA | Big Ten 1 vs. Pac-12 1 |
| Sugar Jan. 2, New Orleans | Big 12 1 vs. SEC 1 |
| Orange Dec. 30, Miami | ACC vs. Big Ten/SEC/ND |
| The rest | |
| Outback Jan. 2, Tampa | Big Ten 2-4 vs. SEC 3-8 |
| Citrus Dec. 31, Orlando | Big Ten 2-4/ACC vs. SEC 2 |
| TaxSlayer Dec. 31, Jacksonville | ACC 3-6/Big Ten 5-7 vs. SEC 3-8 |
| Music City Dec. 30, Nashville | ACC 3-6/Big Ten 5-7 vs. SEC 3-8 |
| Liberty Dec. 30, Memphis | Big 12 5 vs. SEC 3-8 |
| Sun Dec. 30, El Paso, TX | ACC 3-6 vs. Pac-12 5 |
| Arizona Dec. 30, Tucson | MWC vs. Sun Belt |
| Alamo Dec. 29, San Antonio | Big 12 2 vs. Pac-12 2 |
| Belk Dec. 29, Charlotte | ACC 3-6 vs. SEC 3-8 |
| Birmingham Dec. 29 | American vs. SEC 9 |
| Foster Farms Dec. 28, Santa Clara, CA | Big Ten 5-7 vs. Pac-12 4 |
| Pinstripe Dec. 28, New York City | ACC 3-6 vs. Big Ten 5-7 |
| Russell Athletic Dec. 28, Orlando | ACC 2 vs. Big 12 3 |
| Texas Dec. 28, Houston | Big 12 4 vs. SEC 3-8 |
| Cactus Dec. 27, Tempe, AZ | Big 12 6 vs. Pac-12 7 |
| Heart of Dallas Dec. 27 | Big Ten vs. C-USA |
| Holiday Dec. 27, San Diego | Big Ten 2-4 vs. Pac-12 3 |
| Military Dec. 27, Annapolis, MD | ACC vs. American |
| Independence Dec. 26, Shreveport, LA | ACC vs. SEC |
| St. Petersburg Dec. 26 | ACC vs. American |
| Quick Lane Dec. 26, Detroit, MI | ACC vs. Big Ten |
| Hawaii Dec. 24, Honolulu | C-USA vs. MWC |
| Dollar General Dec. 23, Mobile, AL | MAC 1 vs. Sun Belt 2 |
| Armed Forces Dec. 23, Fort Worth, TX | Big 12 vs. Navy |
| Bahamas Dec. 23, Nassau | American vs. MAC |
| Potato Dec. 22, Boise, ID | MAC 2 vs. MWC |
| Poinsettia Dec. 21, San Diego | BYU vs. MWC |
| Boca Raton Dec. 20 | American vs. C-USA |
| Miami Beach Dec. 19 | American vs. MAC |
| Las Vegas Dec. 17 | MWC 1 vs. Pac-12 6 |
| Camelia Dec. 17, Montgomery, AL | MAC 3 vs. Sun Belt 3 |
| Cure Dec. 17, Orlando | American vs. Sun Belt |
| New Mexico Dec. 17, Albuquerque | C-USA vs. MWC |
| New Orleans Dec. 17 | Sun Belt 1 vs. C-USA |
For the most part, conference bowl tie-ins aren’t pegged to specific spots in the league standings.
Rather, most conferences have draft orders.
So where you see "Big 12 2 vs. Pac-12 2" in the Alamo Bowl, that doesn't mean that the second-place teams in those leagues play each other. It means the Alamo gets the second pick of the non-Playoff teams in both leagues. Whether it actually picks the second place team is a different matter.
Bowls care about attendance and revenue. They want good relationships with schools, conferences, and cities, all of whom have interest in rewarding good teams that had good seasons, but most bowls have little incentive to select a team because of its record, unless that record will inspire more fans to attend.
There are exceptions and unique rules.
Just a few examples:
- The ACC, Big Ten, and SEC have pooled some of their bowl bids into groups that the conferences control. That "SEC 3-8" mess in a few bowls above, for example? That means that bowl is part of a group of six bowls that each get an SEC team that fell past the Playoff, New Year's Six, and Citrus. In these cases, it's the conference (not the bowl) that has final say over invites.
- The ACC and Big Ten also share a few bowl games: the Citrus, Music City, and TaxSlayer. The Big Ten normally gets a bid to the Citrus, for example. But in years when the Orange Bowl takes a Big Ten team, the conference gives up its Citrus bid to the ACC.
- A bunch of bowls have agreements to only feature certain teams in X number of years, and some bowls won't take a regular season rematch in any given year. The system prevents some bowls from being seen as toilet bowls, because they're being forced to take different teams all the time. Everyone's in the same boat.
- The ACC and Pac-12 are conferences that also have rules that ensure big-name teams don't get picked too far ahead of high-achieving teams, requiring their bowls to take teams within one game in the conference standings of the top-ranked available team.
- Several mid-major conferences annually rotate bids among a group of bowls like the Miami Beach and Bahamas.
- Independents like BYU and Army must either make their own deals or hope to get in as at-larges. This year, BYU had a deal ahead of the season and was the country's first team to announce its destination, while Army doesn't.
- Independent Notre Dame is a partial ACC member and can cut into the ACC's bowl lineup wherever it's invited, when eligible. But this year, Notre Dame is 4-8.
And so on.
It’s all super confusing, honestly. Just go with it.
Here’s our latest set of projections for this year, current ahead of Championship Weekend.
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