Bowl eligibility
As a result, the NCAA has steadily watered down the criteria for bowl eligibility in favor of higher profits, allowing teams with a non-winning (6–6) record in 2010, further reducing to allow teams with outright losing records (5–7) to be invited by 2012.
The same contingency agreement applied in that season to the Sun Belt Conference and the PapaJohns.com, Independence, and St. Petersburg bowls.
[7] The first season of the new rule saw Temple go uninvited despite going 8–4, including a win over eventual Big East BCS representative Connecticut.
In the 2010–11 bowl season, the UCLA Bruins were invited to a bowl game despite a losing record after playing a conference championship game (6–6 in regular season, played and lost the Pac-12 championship game in extenuating circumstances), while a 7–5 winning team (Western Kentucky) and a 6–6 non-losing team (Ball State) did not receive invites.
Like NCAA sports where a tournament determines an automatic conference bid to the postseason tournament, a team can finish with a losing record (or a winning record but not eligible because of FCS wins) and still appear in a bowl game.
The new rule is still largely consistent with the NCAA rules in all other team sports, where a team that has a losing record that wins their conference championship through the conference tournament earns the automatic bid to the NCAA tournament.
The Pac-12 and ACC have both used it for such division champions, UCLA in 2011 and Georgia Tech in 2012, both of which were 6–6 and advanced to the conference championship game as a result of sanctions to the division winning teams (USC in the 2011 Pac-12 South, North Carolina and Miami in the 2012 ACC Coastal).
They were paired against the 6–6 Memphis Tigers in the 2021 Hawaii Bowl, but ultimately withdrew due to COVID-19 concerns.
The University of Hawaii website does not count that win as an official bowl victory as their competition consisted of local Honolulu All-Stars.
[57] & In 2021, Texas A&M (8–4) withdrew from the Gator Bowl due to an insufficient number of players being available.
[58] The NCAA announced that Rutgers, having the highest Academic Progress Rate (APR) of five-win teams, was the first eligible replacement team—Rutgers accepted the bid.
