2020 Mountain West Bowl Projections
Bowling will be weird this season.
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How many teams go bowling?
Mountain West is back playing football so that means we are going to do some bowl projections and this year they will be more weird than normal.
The Division I Football Oversight Committee announced Thursday that it has recommended waiving the requirements for bowl eligibility for the 2020-21 bowl season, and that is very likely to happen.
The NCAA Division I Council is set to vote on these recommendations at its next meeting Oct. 13-14, and is expected to pass.
Also, a twist is bowl games can start as early as Dec. 1 but not sure what teams will be able to play in those games. Most conference title games can start as early as Dec. 5 or go through the weekend of Dec. 19. The Mountain West’s title game will be played on Dec. 19 and play regular-season games through Dec. 12. The Big Ten and Pac-12 are doing the same. There are multiple leagues playing into December, and the idea is probably flexibility or cancelations.
What this means is that with the very likely different number of games teams will play, it doesn’t matter what a team has for its record. Normally, it is six wins and a .500 record, but now there can and likely will be teams with losing records and that. is fine.
With every team already bowl eligible, what comes next is what the bowl games want for participants. This could become a popularity contest and popular teams could get invited to a bowl game with bad records compared to less popular teams with much better records.
With fans a big question mark, these made-for-TV bowl games want people to watch more than ever since in-person viewing is likely going to be drastically limited.
Hopefully, the conferences will fight for teams with better records to go bowling games and there is very little leapfrogging.
A few notes about the bowl lineups. There is a new bowl lineup for the 2020-26 cycle with one game sort of a TBD with a game in the Dallas area.
That game looks to be the Frisco Bowl (that is what FBSchedules.com has listed) which is in that Dallas region. The opponent is not locked down as the leagues mentioned are the American, C-USA and MAC; so, we will just toss some random team in this initial prediction.
The Las Vegas Bowl is no more and it is basically shifting the same matchup to the new Los Angeles Bowl at SoFi Stadium.
The Hawaii Bowl is also a weird option as it is a three-team mess with AAC and C-USA plus Hawaii. As usual, it makes the most sense that the Hawaii Bowl will host Hawaii if they are not in a New Year’s Six game.
Finally, if the Mountain West is the highest-rated team in the College Football Playoff then a New Year’s Six Bowl game.
- College Football Playoff/New Year’s Six Bowl (Fiesta or Cotton)
- Los Angeles (Bowl name TBA) vs. Pac-12, Los Angeles
- Famous Idaho Potato Bowl vs. MAC, Boise, Idaho
- New Mexico Bowl vs. C-USA, Albuquerque, N.M.
- NOVA Home Loans Arizona Bowl vs. MAC, Tucson, Ariz.
- SoFi Hawai’i Bowl vs. AAC or C-USA, Honolulu
- Tropical Smoothie Café Frisco Bowl vs. AAC, C-USA, AAC
- Cheez-It® Bowl vs. Big Ten or Big 12, Phoenix (MW is an alternate)
Also, dates are not set in stone with the new bowl dates and there is a chance that some bowls may not happen like the RedBox bowl, so as we do these week to week there will be a lot of changes.
Plus, there could be teams that drop out so be prepared for a wild college football season.
With some teams not yet playing, a lot of these are some guesses on how good they are projected to be.
