There are always duds that fall through the cracks. Here are five that missed the College Football Playoff but still managed a spot in the New Year’s Six.
Ostensibly, the first developments of the Bowl Coalition and Bowl Alliance that spawned the Bowl Championship Series and then the College Football Playoff were designed first and foremost to determine a definitive national champion. But the goals of the various modern systems to create bowl matchups have encompassed several sometimes-competing desires.
In addition to the championship game, which was rotated between a grouping of top bowl games, there was a need to fill the other bowl slots affiliated with the various championship series.
Because bowl affiliations predated the consolidation of bowl series, another goal was to ensure major bowl appearances for major-conference champions and other high-ranked members of those leagues. Since the Rose Bowl first set up long-term partnerships with the Big Nine and the Pacific Coast Conference after World War II, a major part of joining a conference was the opportunity to guarantee a bowl appearance for top teams.
Those affiliations doomed the early bowl series, as both the Coalition and Alliance eras failed in large part because they failed to incorporate the Big Ten or the Pac-10 into their membership. Once those two leagues acquiesced finally and opted to join the BCS for the 1998 season, their affiliation with the Rose Bowl was maintained sometimes to the detriment of the best possible pairings.
The evolution to the College Football Playoff didn’t necessarily change those affiliations, either. The five conferences known as the Power Five all have their own tie-ins. The ACC remains affiliated with the Orange Bowl, and there is now a secondary tie-in that alternates between the Big Ten, SEC, and Notre Dame. The Rose Bowl retains its traditional Big Ten/Pac-12 matchup in non-semifinal years. And the Sugar Bowl is linked with the Big 12 and SEC.
What results, often, is a matchup of the best teams from those leagues that did not make the playoff proper. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the New Year’s Six is getting the best possible matchups in those contests.
That brings us to today’s exercise to evaluate the quality of these teams.
What constitutes the best and worst teams to reach the New Year’s Six? Before going forward, it is necessary to set some parameters for evaluation so that we can evaluate these squads on a fair playing field.
The first question is which teams to include in the evaluation. The focus in today’s Sunday Morning Quarterback is more specifically on the non-championship New Year’s Six games from the first four years of the College Football Playoff series. That means we are looking beyond the teams numbered one through four by the selection committee.
We are also focusing specifically on the Power Five teams that reached the New Year’s Six games. The expansion from the BCS to the New Year’s Six included a new guaranteed point of access for whichever Group of Five champion finished the season ranked highest according to the committee.
Based on the methodology we are utilizing today, the Group of Five representative was the weakest of the eight teams that made the non-semifinal bowls in each of the first four years of the playoff series. The goal was not to reinforce the clear and obvious gaps between the Power Five and Group of Five more broadly, as those systemic divisions are what forced the creation of a pathway in the first place.
So we will evaluate the 28 Power Five teams that played in New Year’s Six games between the 2014-2015 season and the 2017-2018 campaign last year. Using winning percentage weighted by each team’s Sports Reference strength of schedule numbers, the weighted winning percentages is then evaluated against each team’s margin of victory in their respective bowl games.
Scaling those numbers to account for negative margins, the final result is a grade that shows which Power Five teams were least deserving of their spot in one of the New Year’s Six bowls.
Who sits at the bottom of a list of worst New Year’s Six participants?
With all that stated up front, here are the five worst Power Five teams to play in a New Year’s Six game since the start of the College Football Playoff era.
5. 2017-18 Washington Huskies (lost 35-28 to Penn State in Fiesta Bowl)
The Fiesta Bowl gave the Huskies a spot in a major bowl game for the second straight season. The Huskies went 10-2 through the regular season, with Stanford pipping them for a spot in the Pac-12 title game. Chris Petersen’s team had one of the weakest schedules of any team ever to reach the New Year’s Six, with the Apple Cup victory over Washington State the only game of the regular season against a ranked team. The Huskies only lost by a touchdown to Penn State in the Fiesta Bowl, but they were nevertheless mismatched.
4. 2014-15 Ole Miss Rebels (lost 42-3 to TCU in Peach Bowl)
Ole Miss was a 9-3 team entering the 2014 Peach Bowl, going up against a TCU team that felt slighted after winning a share of the Big 12 title and falling from inside the top four to outside the semifinals in the last College Football Playoff rankings. Ole Miss benefitted from the hype that the SEC still received in the first year after the end of the BCS era, a series that boosted the conference’s profile as they won eight straight national titles. But their 39-point blowout to TCU remains the worst margin of defeat in a New Year’s Six game.
3. 2015-16 Iowa Hawkeyes (lost 45-16 to Stanford in Rose Bowl)
Iowa was a Big Ten championship game win away from playing for the bigger prize of the College Football Playoff. But the consolation prize of the Rose Bowl even proved too big a stage for Kirk Ferentz’s Hawkeyes. The Big Ten West champs were still granted a New Year’s Six spot despite losing to Michigan State in Indianapolis, but they were thoroughly exposed by Christian McCaffrey and the Stanford Cardinal in Pasadena. McCaffrey posted a 75-yard touchdown reception and a 63-yard punt return score as the Cardinal won by 29 at the Rose Bowl.
2. 2015-16 Oklahoma State Cowboys (lost 48-20 to Ole Miss in Sugar Bowl)
Oklahoma State lost two straight against ranked Baylor and Oklahoma squads to end the regular season 10-2 and finish in a tie for second alongside a TCU side they beat earlier in the Big 12 schedule. But the Cowboys were a flawed lot that proved incapable of showing up at the Sugar Bowl against Ole Miss. Like the Rebels a year earlier in the Peach Bowl, Oklahoma State looked woefully mismatched as they fell by four touchdowns in New Orleans. It was the third-worst margin of defeat behind only 2014 Ole Miss and 2015 Iowa.
1. 2014-15 Baylor Bears (lost 42-41 to Michigan State in Cotton Bowl)
The worst team ever to reach a New Year’s Six bowl game during the current era of college football, however, is the 2014 Baylor team that split the Big 12 championship with TCU. The Bears were ranked fifth entering their Cotton Bowl showdown against Michigan State, a game they would end up losing 42-41. But it was the totality of their schedule that made Baylor the worst team ever to play in a major bowl game during the College Football Playoff era. The Bears played the weakest schedule ever assembled by a New Year’s Six participant according to Sports Reference strength-of-schedule ratings.
Who would you rate as the worst New Year’s Six participant of the College Football Playoff era? Feel free to voice your opinion at @zbigalke and @SaturdayBlitz on Twitter.