College Football Bowl Projections After Week 8: Florida, Clemson Miss Postseason

The 2007 college football season is held in high esteem as one of the wildest seasons of the past 25 years. Every week it felt like a top-five team was getting upset and the Top 10 was just a revolving door of surprising names like Cal, Boston College, Kansas and West Virginia.

Maybe, just maybe, we’re getting a dose of that in 2025. That’s partly because there are no dominant teams (Ohio State and Indiana excepted, perhaps). It really feels like anybody can beat anybody on a given Saturday and you’re just a few games from thinking a winless season is on the table to wondering about a bowl game. That’s not good for the long-term outlook for some head coaches given such parity, but it makes sitting in front of your TV for 18 hours well worth the time investment.

There may not be a better example of the nature of this season than the latest bowl projections. There’s no Penn State or Clemson after both were ranked in the top five during the preseason. Texas appears closer to the Texas Bowl than the College Football Playoff. There’s no Florida in the postseason, fresh off firing its head coach, but Florida International is in.

As a result of such chaos, we also get some compelling matchups. How fun would the Pop-Tarts Bowl be if Louisville and BYU narrowly missed out on the CFP? Auburn and Florida State meeting in the Mayo Bowl would not only be a reunion of the 2013 BCS title game, but a fitting conclusion to both teams’ downward trending year. The quarterback moxie levels at the ReliaQuest Bowl would be off the charts between Nebraska and Vanderbilt. Michigan and Tennessee can settle that Heisman debate from 1997 in the Citrus Bowl. That’s just a sampling of the fun.

Here is how Sports Illustrated sees all of the 35 bowl games coming together to form the postseason picture and which 70 FBS teams will wind up going bowling in 2025–26 after Week 8.