On Sunday, December 8, this year’s final College Football Playoff rankings came out and, perhaps more importantly to someone like me, the matchups for all 40 FBS bowls came to be. Because 78 teams were needed and 79 qualified, one team had to be left without an invitation. It ended up being the 6-6 Toledo Rockets of the Mid-American Conference.
From the perspective of FredRank, my proprietary blend of computer ratings, Toledo was the worst bowl-eligible team this year. They are a borderline bottom 25 team, despite their six wins. They are not, however, the only subpar team to qualify for this year’s postseason. That’s just bound to happen when more than half of the FBS is needed to fill every bowl bid.
I’m prepared to argue that the Toledo Rockets are more deserving of a bowl game in 2019 than one other team who received a bid. That other team is the Liberty Flames.
Liberty will play the Georgia Southern Eagles on December 21 in the Cure Bowl in Orlando, Florida. They are an independent team in their first year of full eligibility for the FBS postseason. They won 7 of their 12 games; because the Flames played Maine and Hampton, both FCS teams, 7 wins were required for full bowl eligibility.
Nominally, the Cure Bowl is supposed to match a team from the Sun Belt Conference against one from the American Athletic Conference. However, earlier this year, Liberty was able to secure a secondary tie-in to the Cure Bowl. If one of the two main conferences could not send a team, Liberty, if eligible, would be the first alternative to be selected for the bowl. At first, this would appear to be the case: the American could not send a team and Liberty stepped in to play instead. But this falls apart a little if you keep digging.
After Memphis was selected for the Cotton Bowl as the highest ranked Group of 5 champion, the following American teams were selected for bowls:
SMU (Boca Raton Bowl)
Central Florida (Gasparilla)
Temple (Military)
Navy (Liberty)
Cincinnati (Birmingham)
Tulane (Armed Forces)
The Boca Raton, Gasparilla, Military and Birmingham Bowls are all tied in to the American. To my knowledge, when the Liberty Bowl cannot find an SEC or Big 12 team to play, the American is one of the backup conferences.
The Armed Forces Bowl, however, was supposed to see the Big Ten play the Mountain West. Instead, it appeared that when Tulane and Southern Mississippi were the best two teams left and every other bowl had been filled, the Armed Forces Bowl was virtually forced to select them. That should have never happened. The Cure Bowl should have had to select Tulane first, leaving Liberty to find a different game elsewhere if someone wanted them.
This is immediately suspect to me. Liberty is already independent of a conference because no one in the FBS wants to deal with what they are. Now they’ve gotten into literally the only bowl that couldn’t completely avoid selecting them.
But aside from that, Liberty isn’t a good football team anyway. They’re second-to-last in Sagarin rating among bowl-eligible teams, ahead of only Toledo. Most of the measures where they rank relatively highly are ones that reward winning, regardless of opponent or margin of victory or anything else that should matter.
Liberty defeated two FCS teams (the aforementioned Maine and Hampton) and five FBS teams this year. They played New Mexico State twice, because no one wants to play NMSU either, and won both games. NMSU finished the year at 2-10. The other three FBS teams were 2-10 New Mexico, 1-11 Massachusetts and 7-5 Buffalo.
So Liberty has two wins against FCS teams, four wins against clearly bad FBS teams and one win against an OK team from a weak conference. When they faced even remotely decent teams, such as Louisiana, BYU and Syracuse, they lost.
The bottom line is that the Cure Bowl should have selected a team out of the American and the Armed Forces Bowl should have been free to choose any of the remaining teams they wanted. I’m not saying Liberty wouldn’t have gotten a bowl game in that situation, but I find it highly suspect that things unfolded so well for them.
From the perspective of FredRank, my proprietary blend of computer ratings, Toledo was the worst bowl-eligible team this year. They are a borderline bottom 25 team, despite their six wins. They are not, however, the only subpar team to qualify for this year’s postseason. That’s just bound to happen when more than half of the FBS is needed to fill every bowl bid.
I’m prepared to argue that the Toledo Rockets are more deserving of a bowl game in 2019 than one other team who received a bid. That other team is the Liberty Flames.
Liberty will play the Georgia Southern Eagles on December 21 in the Cure Bowl in Orlando, Florida. They are an independent team in their first year of full eligibility for the FBS postseason. They won 7 of their 12 games; because the Flames played Maine and Hampton, both FCS teams, 7 wins were required for full bowl eligibility.
Nominally, the Cure Bowl is supposed to match a team from the Sun Belt Conference against one from the American Athletic Conference. However, earlier this year, Liberty was able to secure a secondary tie-in to the Cure Bowl. If one of the two main conferences could not send a team, Liberty, if eligible, would be the first alternative to be selected for the bowl. At first, this would appear to be the case: the American could not send a team and Liberty stepped in to play instead. But this falls apart a little if you keep digging.
After Memphis was selected for the Cotton Bowl as the highest ranked Group of 5 champion, the following American teams were selected for bowls:
SMU (Boca Raton Bowl)
Central Florida (Gasparilla)
Temple (Military)
Navy (Liberty)
Cincinnati (Birmingham)
Tulane (Armed Forces)
The Boca Raton, Gasparilla, Military and Birmingham Bowls are all tied in to the American. To my knowledge, when the Liberty Bowl cannot find an SEC or Big 12 team to play, the American is one of the backup conferences.
The Armed Forces Bowl, however, was supposed to see the Big Ten play the Mountain West. Instead, it appeared that when Tulane and Southern Mississippi were the best two teams left and every other bowl had been filled, the Armed Forces Bowl was virtually forced to select them. That should have never happened. The Cure Bowl should have had to select Tulane first, leaving Liberty to find a different game elsewhere if someone wanted them.
This is immediately suspect to me. Liberty is already independent of a conference because no one in the FBS wants to deal with what they are. Now they’ve gotten into literally the only bowl that couldn’t completely avoid selecting them.
But aside from that, Liberty isn’t a good football team anyway. They’re second-to-last in Sagarin rating among bowl-eligible teams, ahead of only Toledo. Most of the measures where they rank relatively highly are ones that reward winning, regardless of opponent or margin of victory or anything else that should matter.
Liberty defeated two FCS teams (the aforementioned Maine and Hampton) and five FBS teams this year. They played New Mexico State twice, because no one wants to play NMSU either, and won both games. NMSU finished the year at 2-10. The other three FBS teams were 2-10 New Mexico, 1-11 Massachusetts and 7-5 Buffalo.
So Liberty has two wins against FCS teams, four wins against clearly bad FBS teams and one win against an OK team from a weak conference. When they faced even remotely decent teams, such as Louisiana, BYU and Syracuse, they lost.
The bottom line is that the Cure Bowl should have selected a team out of the American and the Armed Forces Bowl should have been free to choose any of the remaining teams they wanted. I’m not saying Liberty wouldn’t have gotten a bowl game in that situation, but I find it highly suspect that things unfolded so well for them.
Comments
Post a Comment