More Bowl Thoughts

I'm by no means a mathematician. In fact I suck horribly at math. The last math class I took was called "Math 1343: Math for Liberal Fine Arts Majors." You laugh but I kid you not. The first lesson we learned was that in a normal election... whoever gets the most votes, wins. But you can also do a point/ranking system. Then electoral college... etc.

The last lesson was balancing a check book.I wish I was joking with you or something but I'm not. Dr. Dimminie ruled. All that to say I'm not qualified to put out the stats I'm about to put out.


But back to the addition of the bowls thing I thought about it some more and let's say that we have 120 teams who only play amongst themselves (I'm dropping the 1-AA games just for math's sake, It shouldn't make a difference)

So:

120 teams
12 games apiece

720 games played (120*12= 1440, 1440/2=720 ***divide by two because each game is shared between two teams)

That means you have an even amount of losses and wins distributed amongst the 120 teams. 720 wins and 720 losses to divide out.

It takes 6 wins to make it to a bowl and there are 34 bowls (68 teams)

68x6=408 wins needed to fill the bowl allotment.

So, every year 408 wins (out of 720 total) need to be shared by 68 teams to meet the bowl fulfillments. That means that it takes 56% of the total number of wins possible to be spread amongst the 68 teams.

Since we have to win 50% (and lose 50%) of our games the differential is 6%. Throwing out the concept of 120 6-6 teams, 6% of the total wins have to be shared amongst your top teams.

That's not hard to do really.

Last year, how many 6-win(or better) teams were left out of the bowl picture?

Six, that I could find.

USCe 6-6
Iowa 6-6
Troy Trojans (8-4... ouch didn't even notice this during the season)
Northwestern 6-6
Louisiana-Monroe 6-6
Miami OH 6-7

So it's not like there's a ton of teams that are there to slip in... but you figure that we just added four more teams out of that group right there with two bowls.

I'm far too lazy to look up the left out teams from two years ago but I don't imagine more than 6-7 teams were given the cold shoulder.

So right now it looks like it'll be OK. We add one more bowl or that bad year nobody wants comes and we just may get to see what happens when we don't have enough bowl spots for teams.

Interesting enough I guess.

Ummm... how many days till kick off now? 114? K thanks.