In the past, the coaching carousel might impact a team’s bowl performance. Today, the transfer portal and increasing opt outs mean more college programs will field teams for bowl games that are fundamentally different from the teams that completed the regular season. Picking the bowl slate means monitoring each participant’s news, analyzing impacts, and adjusting picks accordingly. Do that, and it’s still more of a crap shoot than ever.
This year, I threw my darts in early December and made no adjustments since. The teams meeting on the gridiron aren’t the teams that I evaluated. C’est la vie. C’est football.