Kansas State, with its win over West Virginia on Saturday, now projects to a perfect 12-0 season and the No. 2 spot in the BCS title game. That has caused another shuffling of the BCS bowl pairings, and if this scenario comes to pass, the Fiesta Bowl committee has a difficult choice on its hands.
After the Sugar Bowl takes Florida to replace No. 1 Alabama, the Fiesta gets to chose its replacement for Kansas State. Normally, it would choose another Big 12 team if one is available, and one is, but it's Oklahoma. The problem with picking the Sooners is that it means losing out on Notre Dame, since the two play in the regular season. Not picking OU means that the bowl's conference partner gets only one BCS team, costing it several million dollars. What to do, what to do ...
The guess here is the Fiesta keeps its conference partner happy and passes up a Notre Dame-Oregon match up for Oklahoma-Boise State (an automatic qualifier), which rematches one of the most memorable BCS games ever.
That means the Sugar has the luck of the Irish, and a stellar Florida-Notre Dame pairing.
The Orange then gets ACC champ Florida State vs. Big East champ Louisville.
Rose Bowl folks are happy with their usual Big Ten-Pac 12 game of Nebraska-USC.
As for the other bowls, I am again two teams short of eligibility. There are no teams qualified in the provisional pools either, thanks to Duke attaining full bowl eligibility for the first time since 1994.
There are a couple of options for the NCAA/bowl folks in this situation. One is to determine a way to pick two more teams and fill the games. The other would be to cancel one of the games, since they are short two teams. Since I don't know how they would choose other teams, I picked the latter solution and "canceled" the Heart of Dallas Bowl, which had no teams qualified, no contingency teams qualified, and no sponsor.
