Wisconsin vs. Western Michigan, Cotton Bowl 2016-17: Badgers hold off Broncos

This wouldn’t necessarily mean the Group of 5 giving up on the Playoff. If a Group of 5 team were picked to play in the actual Playoff, it could be replaced by another Group of 5 team.

Expanding the existing Playoff would also be a separate argument, as that raises the question of diluting the national championship.

Every college football media outlet has somebody who does bowl projections, or weekly-ish guesses on which teams will end up playing in which bowls. At SB Nation, it’s me, for no other reason than I started doing it years ago and wasn’t smart enough to stop. I’m occasionally OK at it.

Going back to my preseason guesses, let’s review what went the most sideways. I didn’t list specific records for each team (though I did pick each game beforehand as a starting point), so this is more about which teams ended up the most tiers’ worth of bowls away from where some idiot had put them.

It’s been a while since boxing had itself a titanic heavyweight battle, but we’ll continue to use college football as a proxy in the meantime. Two years ago, I graded the amazing TCU-Baylor game as a 12-round fight. As a nod to how ridiculous Monday night’s Rose Bowl truly was, I’m going to give it the same treatment here.

This, from 2014 TCU-Baylor, still applies:

Wisconsin linebacker T.J. Edwards ended up with the ball early in the fourth quarter of Wisconsin’s 24-16 Cotton Bowl win, setting up the score that would give them a two-score margin at the time. That’s partly notable because Edwards is a linebacker, and the ball in his hands isn’t something that happens often.

It’s also notable because there was a time when Edwards would have been on the opposite sideline. In a team meeting leading up to this bowl game, the Badgers coaches unleashed this picture.

Western Michigan’s Corey Davis is one of the more prolific receivers in the recent history of college football. He’s been a stud this year for the unbeaten Broncos, and he balled out in the Cotton Bowl, as he does.

This touchdown came on fourth-and-4 from the Wisconsin 11-yard line, with the Badgers leading by two touchdowns in the fourth quarter. It kept WMU alive in a game that would’ve effectively ended otherwise. WMU did go on to lose shortly thereafter, but anyway, let’s appreciate Davis being good and making a good catch.

Western Michigan’s offensive desires are, uhh, unconventional to say the least.

The box score description here just doesn’t do this justice: “Zach Terrell pass complete to Corey Davis for 6 yds to the Wisc. 49” This was a lot of work for merely 6 yards. If nothing else, it’s a 3.0 yards-per-lateral output here, so points for creativity.

WIsconsin tight end Troy Fumagalli lit things up with this catch on the first drive of the Cotton Bowl.

The grab extended the drive, and the Badgers marched down the field to score easily and take a 7-0 lead. This is a synopsis of the drive in its entirely.

There are two undefeated teams in college football. One (Alabama) is playing for the national championship, while the other (Western Michigan) never had a real chance to do so this season.

The Broncos could have won 20 games this regular season and it wouldn’t really matter. The Playoff Committee has sent a message about who they’ll let in the Playoff with benefit of the doubt as an established brand name, and who they won’t. Western Michigan is not in the sport’s upper echelon, commonly referred to as the Power 5. The P5 consists of the schools in the Pac-12, Big 12, ACC, SEC, and Big Ten. Notre Dame’s in the mix there, too, despite a 4-8 record in 2016.

Western Michigan is one of the great Cinderellas of this college football season. The Broncos are 13-0 heading into Monday’s Cotton Bowl against Wisconsin (1 p.m. ET, ESPN), for which they were picked as the non-power conferences’ rep in this year’s New Year’s Six bowls. A program from the MAC that went 1-11 just three years ago is playing in the second-highest rung of bowl games, right behind the Playoff.

The central figure in WMU’s football rise is its 36-year-old head coach, P.J. Fleck. He got to Kalamazoo before the 2013 season, with just seven years of college coaching under his belt. He’d been a graduate assistant at Ohio State in 2006, then a receivers coach over the next few years at Northern Illinois, Rutgers, and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Western Michigan’s season has been a magic carpet ride. The Broncos started the year with a mildly improbable win at Northwestern, then kept winning, kept winning, and kept winning a little more. Now they are the MAC champions and the Group of 5 conferences’ representative in the New Year’s Six, taking on Wisconsin at the Cotton Bowl. They and Alabama are the lone undefeated teams in the FBS.

Wisconsin is a worthy opponent standing in the way. The Badgers lost a three-touchdown lead and the Big Ten Championship to Penn State, or else they’d be in the Rose Bowl. But the Cotton is about as good a consolation as they could’ve requested, and they still have the chance to close their season with a meaningful win. They’d finish 11-3 with a victory, while WMU could go to 14-0.

The Western Michigan Broncos were the only Division I team besides Alabama to finish the regular season undefeated, winning the MAC Championship with a 13-0 straight up and 9-4 against the spread record. The Broncos hope to put the finishing touches on this dream season with an upset win over the Wisconsin Badgers in the Cotton Bowl.

Western Michigan is a 7.5-point underdog in Arlington at sportsbooks monitored by OddsShark.com. The team has won each of its last 15 games and is 11-4 ATS over that stretch.

College football’s Rose and Sugar bowls are traditionally on New Year’s Day. That’s not the case this year. They, along with the Cotton and the just-happy-to-be-involved Outback are bumped to Monday, Jan. 2, after the Playoff and a couple other games were on New Year’s Eve.

(The Playoff was on New Year’s Eve, ICYMI. Alabama and Clemson won.)

Both sides are right. Bowls are a cynical money-making exercise, an excuse for ESPN inventory, and an outdated way for all the wrong people to maintain some semblance of control over college football. They’re also happy, bonus football.

We are at both extremes in 2016. We once again had 80 bowl bids to give out and fewer than 80 bowl-eligible teams, a sure sign of bloat and excess. We’re also loaded with perhaps more interesting bowl matchups than we’ve ever seen.

Hey, look what time it is. It’s “propose college coaches for open NFL jobs” season, perhaps the most wonderful time of the year. When Jeff Fisher was fired by the Los Angeles Rams, it coincided with the explosion of a rumor that Jim Harbaugh would head back to the league to coach a team in California. The rumor came from a secondhand quote and the reporter in question, Albert Breer, later clarified.

The MMQB’s Peter King also doesn’t think Harbaugh would come back to the NFL either. King said Stanford’s David Shaw wasn’t ready for the NFL either. But he did float a few names out there who might be.

College football’s bowl season is upon us. A full schedule is here.

There are 40 bowl games spread from Dec. 17 to Jan. 2, with the National Championship on Jan. 9. Unless you’re watching on multiple monitors and are really committed, you won’t catch all of them. (If that is your plan, more power to you.)

The Alabama Crimson Tide are 25-0 straight up and 16-9 against the spread over the course of the longest winning streak in the nation. The Crimson Tide are two wins away from a second consecutive national championship, and they’ll try to earn the first on New Year’s Eve against the Washington Huskies in the Peach Bowl.

Washington vs. Alabama (-16.5)

On Monday, the Heisman Trust released the list of finalists for the 2016 Heisman Trophy. They are Louisville quarterback Lamar Jackson, Oklahoma quarterback Baker Mayfield, Oklahoma receiver Dede Westbrook, Michigan versatile star Jabrill Peppers, and Clemson quarterback Deshaun Watson.

Those players are invited to New York for a final ceremony on Saturday (8 p.m. ET, ESPN), when someone is going to win the award for college football’s most outstanding player. Since the ceremony became part of the Heisman unveiling in the 1980s, the average number of finalists has been four per year. Whether more than three players get invited depends on how close they are in the vote count, so this year’s race was at least tight between the third and fifth highest totals.

Also, head over here for the fully updated bowl season calendar as it fills in, from the New Orleans Bowl through the Rose Bowl. We’ll also add picks, scores, and more to that calendar over time.

The 2015 season’s Cotton Bowl — the one in December between Alabama and Michigan State, not the one in January between Michigan State and Baylor — was arguably the most important Cotton Bowl in a generation. The game hadn’t played host to a No. 2 team like Alabama since 1984, when No. 7 Georgia upset No. 2 Texas to help deny the Longhorns a national title.

After a long season that culminated in an exciting MAC Championship game victory, 13-0 Western Michigan now awaits its fate. The College Football Playoff selection committee will decide which team is the highest-ranked from the Group of 5. That team will head to the Cotton Bowl and take on a top-10 team on New Year’s Day.

WMU coach P.J. Fleck has his own opinion on who it should be.