With Miami, Ohio State, Penn State and North Carolina facing postseason bans, the NCAA created contingency plans to fill bowls if needed. Assuming Georgia Tech gets the waiver in advance and there aren't enough 6-6 teams, Wright thinks the deciding factor for choosing ineligible teams will go straight to the last tiebreaker: APR scores.
In that situation, the five 5-7 teams that have the highest APR scores will be put in a pool for bowls to select and negotiate over, Waters said. All bowl-eligible teams will have to be selected by a bowl first before moving on to the APR teams.
"Which means there's going to be a little bit of a bickering contest when you have two bowls and both want (a 5-7) Wake Forest (over a lower-profile bowl-eligible team)," Waters said. "It'll be, 'You take 'em (the lower-profile team). No, you take 'em."
No one will know who the 5-7 teams are until the season ends. As of now, the top four- or five-win bowl contenders based on APR scores are Rice, Wake Forest, Missouri, Virginia Tech and Utah. After that, the APR order is Baylor, Pitt, West Virginia and Marshall, followed by several others.