Posted by gregsimon on 12/4/2012 6:41:00 PM (view original):
Posted by inkdskn on 12/4/2012 6:23:00 PM (view original):
Since rankings play a role in who plays where, why are bowls even allowed to offer a bid to a school before the final rankings are out? Seems beyond retarded.
Rankings really don't play a roll outside of the BCS bowl games.
Bowls are tied in to a conference usually and are given X choice from such and such conference. The 2012 Independence Bowl was supposed to feature the seventh choice from the ACC vs the 10th choice from the SEC. Unfortunately neither conference had enough bowl eligible teams. Which I guess allows them to choose from bowl eligible non AQ conferences.
Sure they do - not directly, but they absolutely have an impact, which is what caused this. There are the contractual selection orders for the conference, but the BCS trumps all. Where the BCS at-large bids go creates a ripple effect.
What happened here was that you had several bowls (Liberty and Independence among them) that were at the bottom of a conference pick chain and knew just by numbers that they weren't going to get a team from their tie-in, so they were free to offer invites to any eligible team without a tie-in. The Independance Bowl apparently wanted to lock decisions in as soon as possible, whereas the Liberty was talking to La Tech, but wanted to wait to see for sure who would be left after the conference tie-ins before extending an official bid, apparently hoping someone they liked would fall through the conference cracks. Iowa State only became available because NIU bumped OK out of a BCS at-large bid, which meant the Big 12 had 9 bowl eligible teams for 8 spots. And since the MAC has more bowl-eligible teams than tie-ins, NIU going to the BCS didn't open another spot for La Tech.
12/4/2012 9:39 PM (edited)