Stats Corner: Ranking the G5 team making New Year’s Bowl

Photo by David Rosenblum/Icon Sportswire via Getty ImagesThe big dogs have thrown the “mutts” some more scraps to keep them happy. After finally allowing the top best of 5 a New Years Day bowl spot, and allowing Cincinnati to get a playoff spot, the decision was made to expand the playoff to 12 spots with the top 6 conference champions getting a bid plus six at large spots. Theoretically, this means the top conference champion from the MWC, AAC, or Sun-Belt gets in. It will be interesting to see what happens if say, the MWC and AAC champions are ranked higher than the PAC 12 or PAC 10 champion do both get in and the PAC Whatever gets left out? It also makes conference realignment interesting as would San Diego State, Boise State, or Fresno State (interesting that none of those are actually states), move to the PAC 12 and take more money to be middle to low conference teams or stay in the MWC with a better chance to make the college playoff, especially against a watered down AAC with Cincinnati, Houston, and UCF leaving? Same for Oregon, Washington, or Utah leaving the PAC 12 for the BIG10, stay with a better chance of making the playoff or try and make it to the top of the BIG 10? Sounds like a future Stats Corner article. But for this week we are going to look at this year and which Group of 5 has the best chance of making the New Year’s Day bowl. The criteria are current rankings, as shown before on Stats Corner preseason rankings give an advantage combine with the likelihood of running the table or at most one loss. I realize that New Mexico can still go undefeated, but the chance is so same they are not included here but Lobos, feel free to prove me wrong and I will write an article apologizing. Probabilities are from ESPN.

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