Want to watch Kentucky football in Florida? Keep your fingers crossed on Sunday.
Every college football bowl game among the “Pool of Six” submits its top three preferred teams to the Southeastern Conference ahead of Sunday, when final bowl assignments will be announced.
Those listed by the Music City Bowl? Tennessee, Kentucky and Mississippi State.
The Nashville-based bowl is among the most likely postseason destinations, along with the Belk Bowl (Charlotte) and Gator Bowl (Jacksonville), for the 2019 Wildcats. Those three bowls — in addition to the Outback Bowl, Texas Bowl and Liberty Bowl — comprise a group of six SEC-contracted bowls that are, purportedly, of equal stature; however, the Liberty Bowl, by rule, will be the first bowl left without an SEC partner barring some crazy shuffling of the final College Football Playoff rankings on Sunday.
“After that, we’re all equal,” Music City Bowl President and CEO Scott Ramsey told the Herald-Leader. “That’s kind of one of the perceptions that we’re trying to work on a little bit, where there’s not really a pecking order. It’s all trying to make the best matchups you can within those five games each year, and also try to be really thoughtful about a little bit of balance in repetitive trips as much as you can. You can’t really put in hard-and-fast rules, but there’s a lot of rules of thumb in there.”
Among those “rules” is looking ahead to avoid possible matchups of a regular-season games scheduled for 2020. Rivalry rematches — like UK-U of L or Florida-Florida State — are non-starters, too.
Tuesday’s release of the penultimate College Football Playoff rankings made projecting where UK and its SEC brethren might end up a bit easier, but conference-title games have the potential to throw a wrench into everything. If Georgia had defeated LSU, for example, it would’ve created the possibility of two “Pool of Six” games getting left at the altar by the SEC.
Ramsey said he doesn’t know what bowl would be on the receiving end of that call, were it to play out that way. The SEC, when reached for comment by the Herald-Leader, would not speculate on any bowl scenarios. (Officials for the Belk Bowl and Gator Bowl were also contacted and could not be reached for this report).
“It’s a call nobody wants and it’s a call the commissioner won’t enjoy making, but it’ll just be a sheer result of numbers this year if that happens,” Ramsey said.
Time for some final speculation.
LSU wins SEC title
The most likely scenario occurred when LSU defeated Georgia for the SEC championship, effectively removing Georgia from the College Football Playoff discussion and sending the Bulldogs to the Sugar Bowl, which will take the highest-ranked non-playoff SEC team in the College Football Playoff rankings.
Florida, based on Tuesday’s rankings, would get into the Orange Bowl. (Either Penn State or Wisconsin, between whom it is sandwiched in the rankings, could conceivably end up in the Orange Bowl based on conference championship game outcomes, but the Gators seem like the surest bet. The Big Ten championship, in which Wisconsin played late Saturday night, could impact the rankings, too.).
The Citrus Bowl would then probably take Alabama, a tradition-rich program whom it seldom gets an opportunity to host (the Crimson Tide’s only two appearances were following the 1994 and 2010 seasons). That would leave the following five teams for the “Pool of Six”: Auburn, Kentucky, Mississippi State, Tennessee and Texas A&M.
Auburn and Tennessee, based on their regular-season performance, seem most deserving of the Florida trips. One should be in the Gator Bowl and the other in the Outback Bowl, both against Big Ten foes. Texas A&M could be attractive to the Outback Bowl, too, but not so much to the Gator Bowl, which hosted it last year. The Aggies most likely will play against a former Big 12 rival in the Texas Bowl in Houston, as that makes the most travel sense.
That would leave UK and Mississippi State to fill the Belk Bowl and Music City Bowl. Geographically, MSU would make more sense for Nashville than Charlotte. The Music City Bowl also hosted Kentucky two years ago; the Bulldogs haven’t played there since 2011.
Auburn could conceivably be selected by the CFP committee for the Cotton Bowl, depending on how the final CFP rankings shake out. Oregon upsetting Utah in the Pac-12 title game might have taken this possibility off the table, though. If the potential opponent in the Music City Bowl is deemed more attractive to Tennessee, the Volunteers could stay close to home. Those seem to be the only scenarios that would send Kentucky to the Gator Bowl.
With all that considered, I’d project that the Belk Bowl hosts UK for the first time in 2019.
Liberty Bowl?
The Liberty Bowl might not get left out of the equation (it’d require a lot of movement in the final rankings after several upsets, but anything’s possible). In that case, Mississippi State would make the most geographic sense, but the possibility of the Big 12 opponent being Kansas State (a regular-season opponent) makes that tougher to outright project.
If the Liberty Bowl were to enter the equation, the possibility of a Kentucky-Texas pairing would be on the table. The Longhorns, according to 247Sports, haven’t played in Memphis since 1986 and UK last played in the Liberty Bowl after the 2008 season. The programs have met just one time on the football field: a 7-6 Texas win in Austin.
It’s probably more likely that UK ends up in Florida than in a Memphis matchup with Texas, but at this point it’s still technically on the table.
Sunday
College Football Playoff Selection Show
Noon-4 p.m. (ESPN)
This story was originally published December 4, 2019 at 9:23 AM.
