Season 2016 All-star games 3 | Number of bowls 41 | |
Regular season August 27, 2016 (2016-08-27) – December 10, 2016 (2016-12-10) Bowl games December 17, 2016 (2016-12-17) – January 9, 2017 (2017-01-09) National Championship 2017 College Football Playoff
National Championship | ||
The 2016–17 NCAA football bowl games were a series of college football bowl games which completed the 2016 NCAA Division I FBS football season. The games began on December 17, 2016 and aside from the all-star games ended with the 2017 College Football Playoff National Championship which was played on January 9, 2017.
Contents
- Schedule
- College Football Playoff and Championship Game
- Non CFP bowl games
- CFP top 25 teams
- Bowl eligible teams
- Bowl ineligible teams
- References
A total of 41 team-competitive postseason games were played, including the national championship game. To fill the 80 available bowl slots, a record 20 teams (25% of all participants) with non-winning seasons participated in bowl games—17 had a .500 (6-6) season, and three sub-.500 (one 6-7 and two 5-7) teams were required. For example, none of the six teams that played in bowls on December 26 had a winning record. This was the seventh time in the past nine years that teams with losing records have participated in bowl games.
Schedule
The schedule for the 2016–17 bowl games are below. All times are EST (UTC−5).
College Football Playoff and Championship Game
The College Football Playoff system will be used to determine a national champion of Division I FBS college football. A 13-member committee of experts will rank the top 25 teams in the nation after each of the last seven weeks of the 2016 season. The top four teams in the final ranking will play a single-elimination semifinal round, with the winners advancing to the National Championship game.
The semi-final games were held at the Fiesta Bowl and the Peach Bowl as part of a yearly rotation of three pairs of six bowls. Their winners advanced to the 2017 College Football Playoff National Championship at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida on January 9, 2017. As with the 2015 season, the two semi-final bowls were held on New Year's Eve (Saturday, December 31, 2016), as the Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowl are guaranteed exclusive TV time slots on January 2 if New Year's Day fell on a Sunday (there is a gentleman's agreement to not play New Year's Day bowl games against NFL games, which are played as usual when New Year's Day falls on a Sunday), regardless of whether they will be hosting a semifinal game.
To reduce the impact of the semi-final games' New Year's Eve scheduling—a factor that led to lower viewership of the 2015 semi-finals in comparison to 2014, it was announced on March 8, 2016 that the kickoff times of the two bowls would be pushed forward to 3:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. ET. CFP commissioner Bill Hancock suggested that starting the games earlier would allow viewers to partake in both the CFP games and New Year's festivities. As the earlier start intrudes on the early afternoon window for New Year's Six games, the 2016 Orange Bowl was instead held as a primetime game on December 30, 2016. As a result, the "New Year's Six" bowls are stretched across a period of four days, rather than two consecutive days of three games each. In July 2016, Hancock announced that future semi-finals, when not hosted by the Rose and Sugar Bowl games, will generally be held on the final Saturday of the year.
Of the Power Five conferences, The Big Ten was represented with four teams in the New Year's Six, whereas the ACC, SEC and Pac-12 had two teams each. The Big 12 was again left out of the semifinals, and had just one team in the New Year's Six. The Power of 5 was represented by the MAC.
Non-CFP bowl games
On April 11, 2016, the NCAA announced a freeze on new bowl games until after the 2019 season. The NCAA plans to revise its postseason eligibility criteria in the aftermath of the 2015 season, where a record three teams with losing records (5–7) were allowed to participate in bowls due to there being not enough bowl-eligible teams, and the inaugural Arizona Bowl had to be played between two Mountain West teams due to the lack of eligible teams to meet its other tie-ins.
Prior to the moratorium, multiple new bowl games were proposed for or approved to begin play in 2016, including one in Myrtle Beach, the Medal of Honor Bowl (which planned to convert itself from an all-star game to a sanctioned bowl after the NCAA lifted its ban on postseason championships at pre-determined locations in South Carolina), the Sun Belt/American Austin Bowl, and a Mountain West/Pac-12 bowl in Melbourne, Australia. The Sun Belt subsequently announced that it would become a new primary tie-in for the Arizona Bowl.
CFP top 25 teams
On December 4, 2016, the College Football Playoff selection committee announced their final team rankings for the year:
In the third year of the College Football Playoff era, this was the first time that one of the four semifinalists (Ohio State) was not a conference champion.
Bowl-eligible teams
Number of bowl berths available: 80
Number of bowl-eligible teams: 76
Number of conditional bowl-eligible teams: 2 (Hawaii, South Alabama)
Number of teams qualified by APR: 2 (North Texas, Mississippi State)
Bowl-ineligible teams
Number of bowl-ineligible teams: 48
Note: Being bowl-ineligible does not, in itself, exclude a team from the chance to play in a bowl game. Tiebreaker procedures based on a school's Academic Progress Rate (APR) allowed for the possibility of 5–7 teams to play in bowl games since not enough teams qualified to fill all 80 spots with at least a 6–6 record.