![]() Second, keep in mind that the rest of these bowl selections don't strictly follow the standings. ![]() (Although we all know more wins overall make teams generally more attractive to bowls.) ![]() For these bowl games, you need to think of the Pac-12 as a single table, ordered by conference record - overall record is technically not part of the selection criteria. First, forget about the divisions - they're only used to select the Pac-12 Championship Game participants. When it comes to selecting the teams for the remaining bowls, it's helpful to keep a few things in mind. Selecting the rest of the Pac-12 bowl representatives VEGAS BABY Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images Oregon was ranked 11th in last week’s CFP and Utah was 18th, so it seems like it would be highly unlikely that the Pac-12 puts two teams in the top 10 or 11. The last time the Pac-12 got two teams into the New Year’s six was 2017, when Washington played in the Fiesta Bowl (because the Rose Bowl was a semifinal that year) and USC played in the Cotton Bowl. The Pac-12 has rarely benefited from this provision, unsurprisingly. There's a provision to get in a "Group of 5" team from the minor conferences, but in general, if you're from the Pac-12 and you're not the conference champ and you're in the top 10 of the CFP rankings, you're going to one of those New Year's Six bowls. Unlike the BCS era, which featured all sorts of shady moves that seemed to screw the Pac-10 every year, getting into a New Year's Six game is as simple as being rated high enough in the CFP rankings. With the advent of the CFP, that arrangement was replaced by the so-called “New Year’s Six” - the four “BCS bowls” plus the Cotton Bowl and the Peach Bowl, with the national championship on top of that at a rotating site. If you remember the old BCS era, there were five big bowl games - the Rose Bowl, Fiesta Bowl, Orange Bowl and Sugar Bowl, plus the national championship, which was a second game played at one of those sites a week to 10 days later. However, in years when the Rose Bowl is not one of the semifinals and its champion is one of the four CFP teams? The Rose Bowl gets to choose a replacement from the remaining bowl eligible Pac-12 teams. So, the winner of Friday’s Pac-12 Championship Game between Oregon and Utah will head to the Rose Bowl. That’s the case this year, as the Pac-12 no longer has a team contending for one of the four spots. So here's where we start: If the Pac-12 champ isn't one of the four teams selected for the playoff, that team will head to the Rose Bowl - provided the Rose Bowl isn't one of the semifinal games for the playoff. The Rose Bowl Photo by Brian Rothmuller/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images Not even the Rose Bowl is as simple as sending the conference champs from the Pac-12 and Big Ten anymore. The problem with this table, though, is that it's full of misleading information. The Pac-12 has tie-ins with six bowl games, in the following order (that's an important piece, which we'll explain in a second): This is the most logical place to begin, since you're here to try and figure out where your favorite team might end up. Here's everything you need to know to try and figure out where WSU - or any team in the Pac-12 - will land in the postseason. Thankfully, the conference has clear procedures in place, and it's not nearly as much about shady back-room deals as it was a couple of decades ago. With Washington State set to make its sixth consecutive (in a full season) bowl appearance, it makes sense to revisit the process by which the conference’s bowl participants are picked. ![]() ![]() The world of Pac-12 bowl game selections can be a complicated and confusing place. ![]()
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