There are some people who are fans of college football who hate bowl games and think that 39 bowl games that are completely unconnected to the playoff system are a bad thing. I must admit that I appreciate a playoff that gives the best teams a chance to win something truly meaningful, and so the 12-team playoff system that is set to start next year looks like a great idea as far as I am concerned. That said, playoffs are loser factories, because there is only one team that ultimately wins the playoffs and everyone else goes home unhappy. With a bowl game, a team that would otherwise not have a chance to enjoy a meaningful win can at least win a game that can give it some revenue, something to cheer about, and a way to end the season on a high note in a way that is increasingly rare in sports where increasing the size of playoffs and therefore increasing the amount of losers in competition appears to be the order of the day.

James Madison University, named after the third president of the United States, perhaps still best known as being the Father of the American constitution, bff to previous president Thomas Jefferson, congressional floor general in the House of Representatives that got the Bill of Rights passed through Congress and submitted to the states to help ensure the success of the Constitution as an enduring governing document, and also one of the founders of the Democratic-Republican Party that dominated politics from 1800 to 1824 in the first American party system after the first three elections were won by competing Federalists, is currently listed as being bowl ineligible despite a 9-0 record. This is because the Dukes (?) are in their second-year of transition from FCS/Division I-AA to FBS/Division I-A football as members of Sun Belt Conference. Currently, in terms of record, the JMU Dukes are leading the conference with an unbeaten 9-0 record, and looking at their schedule, it is entirely possible that they could end up 12-0 at the end of the regular season and run away with the East Division lead of that conference without having clinched bowl eligibility.

But what can be done to ensure that they get a bowl? As it happens, there is really nothing that they can do except to keep winning. There are 42 bowl games (with three of them connected to the playoff), and 82 teams total qualify for the postseason in the Football Bowl Division (FBS, as noted above), the highest division of college football. In order to reach the postseason, the general standard is that a team must have 6 wins in a 12-game season, or 7 wins in a 13-game season, with one or fewer of those wins being against a team from the Football Championship Division (FCS), the next division down. In addition, teams that are in their first two years of moving up from a lower division are considered to be ineligible for the postseason unless there are not enough teams to fill the available slots in bowl games. When there have been seasons with more teams qualifying for bowl games than spots, there has been a tendency for temporary one-year bowl games to be staged in order to allow good teams the chance for a morale-boosting and sometimes lucrative bowl game against teams of similar quality. If students of directional Midwest schools like Central, Eastern, or Western Michigan are willing to pay money to see a meaningless but potentially interesting game in Frisco, Texas or Nassau, Bahamas, I see nothing wrong with such games being played. So far, at least, there has been an unwillingness for bowl games to be created to circumvent the prohibition of newly elevated teams from reaching the postseason, which in basketball has been more consequential. I wrote a couple of years ago about the problem with Bellarmine, another rising university, that was unable to play in postseason basketball because it was a new school in Division I, and a similar situation exists in football.

There are, however, exceptions to the general bowl ineligibility of new teams, and it is these exceptions which we must now seek if we want to see the Dukes or Jacksonville State (another rising team that has already won 6 games and would otherwise be bowl-eligible) in the postseason of college football. That exception comes in the requirement of 82 teams to play the games that are already scheduled. If there are not enough teams that qualify with 6 (or 7) wins, there is a list of backup teams to fill those slots for games, and it is certainly possible that James Madison University and perhaps even Jacksonville State will be able to be at the front of the line for these unfilled bowl slots. Ahead of them on the list would be a Hawaii team that ends up at 6-7. This would require Hawaii, currently 3-7, to win its remaining three games, so the easiest scenario would have Hawaii losing at least one more game to eliminate themselves from a possible bowl slot. Hawaii’s last three games (as of the writing of this essay) are against 8-1 Air Force, an away game at Wyoming, a tough venue to play against a team that is already bowl-eligible, and a game against a Colorado team that like Hawaii is still struggling currently to reach bowl eligibility itself at 3-6. It is easy to see Hawaii losing one or two or even perhaps all three games and eliminating itself from the possible teams that could end up in a bowl game.

This would be the only team that could end up ahead of James Madison and then Jacksonville State in the list of teams looking for a bowl game. But there are still other things that could happen in order to create openings in bowl games that need to be filled. One thing that both James Madison and Jacksonville State can do for themselves is to keep winning. James Madison completes its regular season against UConn (already bowl-ineligible), Appalachian State (currently 5-4 and not yet bowl eligible), and Coastal Carolina (currently 6-3 and already bowl eligible). Aside from Appalachian State, there is no other team that James Madison could knock out of contention for a bowl game. Jacksonville State missed a chance against the University of South Carolina (the other USC) to knock them out of bowl contention, but finished against Louisiana Tech (already bowl-ineligible with seven losses) and New Mexico State (already bowl-eligible with seven wins in a 13 game season). If they win both games–Jacksonville State is 7-3 right now–Jacksonville State could end up at 9-3 in Conference USA while James Madison could end up 12-0, or even 13-0 if they win the Sun Belt Championship, both of them being extremely attractive candidates for any bowl game.

The main issue is that it depends on what happens with other teams. Currently, as of the writing of this essay, there are 55 teams of the 82 that have already clinched eligibility for the bowl games by getting the requisite 6 wins, with 5 or more of them coming against the top division of college football. Another team, the University of Louisiana (at Lafayette), could clinch a bowl game with a win tonight, they are currently tied 14-14 with bowl-ineligible Southern Miss as I write this, and would be the 56th team to qualify for a bowl game with their 6th win tonight. Fifteen other teams are one-win away from a bowl game, but games between 6 of these teams this weekend means that 3 of these teams already have clinched their own spots, but which teams those will be is not yet known. One of these teams, 5-4 Florida, is considered an underdog in its remaining three games and very well could miss out on a bowl game at 5-7 after going through a tough closing slate of games at Louisiana State, at Missouri, and then at home against a currently unbeaten Florida State team looking to clinch a spot in the top 4 teams that go to the playoffs.

With 133 teams in the FBS, and 82 teams of those qualifying for the postseason, James Madison would need for at least 51 teams to fail to get the required number of wins in order to ensure a bowl game, and Jacksonville State would need a 52nd team to fail. Currently, 25 teams are already bowl-ineligible, with 22 of them guaranteed to be below both James Madison and Jacksonville State in the pecking order. Where are the remaining teams going to come from? If Hawaii loses at least one more game, they would be one of them. Seventeen more of the teams could come from all of the teams that are one loss away from bowl ineligibility losing one of their last 3 (or 4) games. The other teams could come from the 26 teams that are within 2 games of ineligibility that will end up with at least 5 losses by the end of this week. If there is a great deal of separation between good teams getting well more than the minimum of 6 wins and bad teams that fail to get 6 wins, there will be more space for both James Madison and Jacksonville State, and perhaps the best of the 5-win teams below them. Of course, these matters are out of the hands of both teams. They just have to keep winning to make themselves even more attractive to potential bowl games and hope that other good teams win and that mediocre teams keep losing. Whether that will happen or not remains to be seen.