These are the bowl-eligible college football teams that aren’t playing in bowl games

There are 39 FBS bowl games in college football, not counting the Playoff National Championship game. To be eligible for one of the 78 bowl slots, a team needs to finish .500, which usually works out to 6-6. This season brought 82 eligible teams, meaning three teams with .500-plus records had to get the short end of the bowl stick. (That’s not counting bowl-banned Ole Miss or FBS-reclassifying Coastal Carolina.)

As it’s turned out, those teams are Buffalo, UTSA, and Western Michigan.

Here’s the full bowl schedule. And here’s a bit on the teams that missed out:

The Bulls were quietly one of the great turnaround stories in college football this year. They went from 2-10 in 2016, Lance Leipold’s second season as head coach, to a bowl game if they hadn’t gotten unfortunately left out.

Had they not lost to WMU in a record-tying seven-overtime game, they would have had a seven-win season and looked even better. Their resurgence has been impressive anyway.

(More on WMU below.)

The Roadrunners made their first bowl appearance ever in 2016, and they liked it so much they decided to do it again this year. They deserved a slot but wound up the victims of a scarcity of C-USA tie-ins in a league that had 11 bowl-eligible teams.

UTSA had a pretty good defense this year, one of the best in the non-power conferences, and probably better than plenty of Power 5 units. The Roadrunners have also recruited well and should be a significant player in C-USA for a while. But they’re done for this year despite being above .500 with one game canceled due to weather.

The Broncos took a big step backward from last year’s 13-1 season. That was always going to happen. But new coach Tim Lester picked up the baton from P.J. Fleck and did a nice job, doing enough to get WMU to the postseason for the fourth year in a row.

The Broncos scored a bunch of points despite not having much of a downfield passing game, and they’ve been one of the better field position teams in the country. They would’ve been fun to watch in a bowl, but the MAC couldn’t secure them a spot.

We haven’t gotten explanations yet and might not, but the simplest answer: Bowl selections are weird, and they don’t favor smaller schools.

Some conferences have a direct hand in sorting out who goes where, and some bowl games are part of a pecking order and get to draft teams. These schools all have fairly small fanbases. UTSA’s a startup program that only began playing a few years ago, for instance, and might not travel well.

Bowl and TV executives aren’t that worried about team quality in the first place, at least not compared to ratings and attendance draws. When there’s a surplus of teams, it’s easy for mid-majors to get shut out. That’s what’s happened to these three.