Cal Still Has a Teeny-Weeny Chance to Play in a Bowl Game

Beating UCLA on Friday would be the first of three requirements for the Bears to get a postseason berth

When Cal lost to Oregon State on November 12, handing the Bears their seventh defeat of the season, it was reported far and wide that the door on Cal’s chances of landing a bowl berth had officially closed.

Well, the door is just slightly ajar, not open far enough to see anything on the other side but enough to let a single ray of light through.

Yes, there is still a chance for Cal to earn a bowl berth, but the odds are so overwhelmingly against it, that it would be labeled OFF THE BOARD in Las Vegas. For discussion purposes, let’s place the odds at 500-to-1.

There are three elements to Cal’s chances of getting into a bowl, and none of them favors Cal. The first one is straightforward at least. Here are the three steps.

1. Cal must beat UCLA on Friday to finish the regular season with a 5-7 record. Getting past that first obstacle is a longshot since the Bruins are 8-3 and are listed as 10-point favorites. But we need to go no further if Cal loses that game.

Let’s assume Cal wins that game and we can go on to stipulation No. 2.

2. There must be more bowl vacancies than bowl-eligible teams.

There are 41 bowls providing openings for 82 teams. At the moment only 74 teams are bowl-eligible (at least six wins and guaranteed not to have a losing record).

Fifteen other teams can get a sixth win this weekend to become bowl eligible, and you would expect that at least eight of them will become bowl eligible to fill the 82 bowl slots, right?

Maybe not.

One spot will be taken by the winner of the Georgia Southern game against Appalachian State because both have five wins. The winner will become bowl-eligible, reducing the number of bowl vacancies to seven.

But one team must lose, reducing the number of possible bowl-eligible teams to 13.

Of those remaining 13 teams, only four are favored to win their final game to become bowl-eligible.

Here are the 13 teams (excluding the Georgia Southern-Appalachian State winner) that could become bowl eligible with their next opponent. In parentheses is their Academic Progress Report (APR), which will become important if we get to the next step. The team needing one win to become bowl eligible is listed first in each matchup.

Rice (994) at North Texas

Auburn (983) at Alabama

Missouri (983) vs. Arkansas

Michigan State (983) at Penn State

Miami (982) vs. Pittsburgh

Georgia Tech (979) at Georgia

Vanderbilt (973) vs. Tennessee

Buffalo (968) vs. Kent State

Louisiana (955) at Texas State

Florida Atlantic (949) vs. Western Kentucky

UAB (945) at Louisiana Tech

Southern Miss (934) at ULM

UTEP (934) vs. UTSA

If there are not enough bowl-eligible teams to fill the 82 bowl openings, some teams without the standard bowl-eligible requirements may become eligible for a bowl.

OK, let’s assume Cal beats UCLA and fewer than 82 teams become bowl eligible. That takes us to Stipulation No. 3

3. Cal's Academic Progress Report (APR) must be good enough to land a bowl vacancy.

If there are not enough teams to fill the 82 bowl slots, 5-7 teams become eligible to fill those vacancies. There will be a lot of 5-7 teams, so the NCAA requires than any remaining bowl openings be filled by 5-7 teams based on their APR.

The 5-7 team with the best APR gets the berth if there is one opening. The 5-7 teams with the second-best APR gets the second opening, if there is one. And so on.

Cal’s football APR for the previous school year was 975, which is pretty good, but a number of schools have better APRs as you can see from the list of teams nearly bowl eligible. You can look at the football APR of each Division I team by clicking here.

You can see that six of the teams that need one win to become bowl eligible have a higher APR than Cal, so they would be ahead of Cal to fill bowl vacancies if they fail to win their games this weekend.

But maybe all 13 teams needing one win fail to get that sixth win this weekend, leaving seven spots for 5-7 teams. In that scenario, if Cal’s 975 APR score for football is among the seven best of the 5-7 teams, the Bears would get a bowl berth. If, say, four of those 13 teams win to become bowl eligible, three vacancies would remain and Cal would have to be among the three best APR scores of 5-7 teams to earn a bowl berth.

How good is a 975 score? Well, it’s tied for the fifth best in the Pac-12, and you can compare it to any other school by clicking this list provided by College Football News.

And just how many teams will be 5-7 after this weekend? It could be any of the 13 teams above if it loses this weekend. And there are about 20 other schools who could finish 5-7, including Cal and a couple of 4-6 teams that have two games to play.

Cal has a better APR than all but about five or six of those 20. And the Bears' APR is better than seven of of the 13 teams that need wins this week to become bowl eligible and would drop to 5-7 if they lose.

However . . . . 

Looking at the six teams that could become bowl eligible this weekend and also have a better APR than Cal, you can see that they would either take a bowl spot or be ahead of a 5-7 Bears team to fill a vacancy based on APR. That would account for six of the seven vacancies, leaving one spot open.

Would Cal get that one remaining bowl vacancy if every other team needing one win lost?

Of course, Cal could decline to play in a bowl even if it qualifies as a 5-7 team, and that’s certainly possible given that such teams have generally shut down practices and football activities following their 12th game.

So Cal:

---must beat UCLA

---needs there to be more bowl vacancies than bowl-eligible teams

---needs its APR to be good enough to land one of the remaining bowl openings.

---must be willing to accept a bowl offer as a 5-7 team.

It’s a long shot, perhaps longer than long.

But as Lloyd Christmas would say, “So you’re telling me there’s a chance.”

.

Cover photo by Darren Yamashita, USA TODAY Sports

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