College football bowl projections: How Tennessee could end up in Las Vegas - The Athletic

We’ll be publishing full bowl projections every Tuesday the rest of the way, incorporating Stewart’s latest mock Playoff bracket.

His latest edition on Sunday had a projected 10-2 Tennessee team as the first team out. As if that’s not cruel enough, we have the Vols slipping all the way to the Las Vegas Bowl against Arizona State. The Citrus Bowl is out because they just played there last year, where they faced Iowa, which we have as the Big Ten rep in the ReliaQuest (formerly Outback) Bowl.

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With LSU, Texas A&M and South Carolina all projected to finish 9-3, we have the Citrus selecting the Gamecocks because they’d be going in with the most momentum and would likely sell a ton of tickets.

We also pivoted from BYU to Colorado as our projected Big 12 champ this week, which has an interesting ripple effect. If the Cougars drop one regular-season game (and they’ve been playing with fire of late), we could get 11-1 Washington State vs. 11-2 BYU in the Alamo Bowl.

As of this week, we’re projecting 71 eligible teams for the 70 non-CFP bowl slots. Sorry, Eastern Michigan.

A friendly reminder: Most non-CFP bowls do not have to select teams in order of conference standings.

Notes: (ESPN) indicates an ESPN Events bowl. Teams can be moved between them. An * indicates a replacement team because a league was not able to fill all of its slots.

(Illustration: Demetrius Robinson / The Athletic, Photos: Don Juan Moore / Getty)

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