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Puzzles over postseason prospects if KU beats Baylor

Puzzles over postseason prospects if KU beats Baylor

On December 1, 2024By Littum

AP Photo/Sam Hodde

The color guard practices on the field before the First Responder Bowl NCAA college football game between Utah State and Memphis, Tuesday, Dec. 27, 2022, in Dallas.

The Kansas football program has one big hurdle to clear if it wants to reach a third straight game for the first time ever: beating a streaky Baylor team in a stadium where the Jayhawks have never won.

If they do, it’s anyone’s guess what the month of December might hold.

Due to the new 12-team College Football Playoff format, a possible surplus of bowl-eligible teams and a relatively low number of games with Big 12-specific tie-ins — two of which the Jayhawks have already been selected for in recent years – a 6-6 KU team could play any number of places at any number of times.

In fact, the Jayhawks could even be left out of the postseason altogether in a few different ways.

How they could be left out if they win at Baylor: There are 35 FBS bowl games outside the playoffs, so 70 teams, plus 12 more teams going to the playoffs, meaning a possible 82 postseason berths for bowl-eligible programs. Already, 77 teams have reached the six-win threshold. Among the 16 current five-win teams, Virginia and Virginia Tech play each other, as do Eastern Michigan and Western Michigan, meaning 79 are guaranteed to reach bowl eligibility. That means as many as nine of the 12 remaining teams could get six wins and still be out of a postseason berth.

Granted, a 6-6 KU team entering the postseason on a four-game winning streak with a large fan base and some national attention would seem to be a pretty appealing choice to many bowl committees, so perhaps the Jayhawks’ don’t find yourself stuck in such a scenario.

How they could be left out if they lose: This is perhaps a little more obvious; that said, teams with 5-7 records have occasionally been known to earn bowl berths in the event of a lack of bowl-eligible options (which has not been rare at all in recent years). For the above reasons, it doesn’t seem very likely this year. Although e.g. all 12 additional teams lose and there are three empty spots remaining, the three teams to fill them will likely be selected based on the NCAA’s Academic Progress Rate (APR), as they have done in past years, and in most latest APR data available online at the NCAA website has KU coming in lower than most of the teams it would be measured against.

Provided that KU makes some kind of bowl

As a result of its recent success, KU has begun showing up in bowl projections compiled by national college football pundits, though it has yet to come out of a game where it is narrowly expected to win — after Baylor opened as the favorite — to initially become an opportunity. From a sample size of nine projectors, two, Erick Smith of USA Today and Steven Lassan of Athlon Sports, perhaps feeling some uncertainty about this result, left KU out entirely.

The rest, the Jayhawks have in all kinds of places: two in the Birmingham Bowl, two in the Independence Bowl, one in the First Responder Bowl, one in the Frisco Bowl and one in the Rate Bowl.

The first thing you might notice if you’ve followed this sort of thing over the years is that some of these aren’t even bowl games with specific Big 12 tie-ins.

That’s likely because the Big 12 already has nine bowl-eligible teams and could get as many as two more if KU and Cincinnati both win this weekend (the Bearcats face TCU). On its 2024-25 bowl selection process website, the Big 12 lists seven possible slots, plus additional opportunities to play in “ESPN Events Pool Games,” for its longtime teams.

Its four recent additions from the Pac-12, for good measure, have their own set of six possible games that they share with their former league mates that have spread to the four wins. Two of the Big 12’s bowl-eligible teams, Arizona State and Colorado, are former Pac-12 members.

That means if KU and Cincinnati enter the picture, as many as nine teams could be earmarked for seven Big 12 spots, which could leave the lower-ranked contenders among them for the mystery ESPN Events games.

The consensus among bowl projectors such as Action Network’s Brett McMurphy and The Athletics’ Scott Dochterman and Stewart Mandel appears to be that ESPN Events — the division of ESPN that owns and operates a total of 16 FBS bowl games — can move teams, however between its various competitions it chooses. That’s probably why McMurphy and Bill Bender of The Sporting News have KU in the ESPN-owned Alabama-based Birmingham Bowl against Oklahoma and Vanderbilt, respectively, and CBS Sports’ Jerry Palm puts the Jayhawks against OU in the Frisco Bowl in Texas, even though no of the games in recent years have boasted an explicitly stated Big 12 affiliation.

ESPN’s Mark Schlabach has KU in a game with a familiar Big 12 tie-in, the Dallas-area First Responder Bowl against Memphis. Brad Crawford of 247Sports also opted for a standard Big 12 bowl by putting the Jayhawks in the Rate Bowl — but its fancy new name belies the fact that it’s the same Guaranteed Rate Bowl that KU played UNLV in last year. (His proposed opponent this time is Rutgers.) This recent selection, as well as the fact that KU went to the Liberty Bowl in 2022, appears to eliminate the Jayhawks from consideration for two of the Big 12’s lower-tier berths — presenting an additional projection challenge .

That could explain why Dochterman and Mandel, as well as ESPN’s Kyle Bonagura, placed KU in the Shreveport, Louisiana-based Independence Bowl (against Army and Louisiana, respectively). This game was a straightforward Big 12 tie-in last year; the league sent Texas Tech. Now it’s part of the pool for former Pac-12 teams.

However, it is not clear if there would even be room for KU in this game if it were an option; remember, there are six previous Pac-12 bowl tie-ins for the likes of not just Arizona State and Colorado, but Oregon, USC, Washington, Washington State, etc. There could be another surplus of eligible teams, though top-ranked Oregon is a lock for the CFP and ASU or CU could pull through by winning the Big 12 title.

All this guesswork, with minimal clarity, provides a stark contrast to last season, when the then-Guaranteed Rate Bowl, with one week left in the regular season, was a pretty clear favorite to serve as KU’s postseason destination.

Even then, of course, it came as a surprise that the Jayhawks were matched up against UNLV and not a Big Ten Conference team as expected — showing the sheer unpredictability of the college football postseason.