In the lead-up to the upcoming college football season, Sports Unbiassed is taking a look at the top 20 teams with a chance to win the Access Bowl bid in 2015. You can find the full list of the Top 20, links to other team previews, and read more about the methodology behind the rankings here.
East Carolina...
Last year provided the first glimpse of what a new future of increased access for mid-major programs might look like. No longer was an undefeated season and praying for a high ranking a prerequisite for selection to a major bowl game for the schools of the Mountain West, AAC, Sun Belt, Conference USA, and MAC.
The hierarchy still...
East Carolina v. Florida
Legion Field -- Birmingham, AL
January 3, 2015 -- 12:00 pm Eastern (ESPN)
Why You Should Watch
It's the last Saturday college football game until September, as the NFL wild-card round comes to dominate the gridiron calendar on the first weekend of 2015. It is...
The College Football Playoff selection committee will release its inaugural Top 25 standings on Tuesday, and that will certainly give us a better understanding of how they are perceiving the strength of various Group of Five contenders in the field. Everything up to this point in the post-BCS era has been mere speculation; now we...
Week 8 thinned the field even further, though ultimately it is important to remember that the selection committee's decision will come down to just five teams -- the quintet that win the conference championships in the American, Conference USA, Mountain West, MAC, and Sun Belt. Ultimately every other team will fall out of the...
Though the margin of error for mid-major teams fighting to win the Group of Five's automatic bid into the College Football Playoff has increased compared to the BCS era, losses are inevitably detrimental to a contender's hopes. And two teams fell back into the pack of two-loss hopefuls after sustaining losses on Saturday.
One...
In a week marked by chaos all over the college football landscape, teams from the Group of Five were not immune to upsets. Three more teams fell by the wayside for now in the hunt for the guaranteed berth in one of the College Football Playoff-affiliated bowl games... and that doesn't include BYU, whose longshot bid for a spot in one...
16 teams from the Group of Five schools entered the last weekend of September with one or fewer losses. Two of the 16 were undefeated. Only Marshall remained unbeaten after the weekend was over, and eight others lived to see October with a sole defeat. As a result, the field is getting thinner in the hunt for the first-ever...
The new automatic bid for teams from the Group of Five conferences into one of the New Year's Day bowl games under the auspices of the College Football Playoff, on face value, affords greater access to the system than mid-major leagues have ever received in the past. Truly great teams like Tulane in 1998, Marshall in 1999, TCU in...
