Intellectual brutality renewed: How Rice can still achieve bowl eligibility

By Andersen Pickard     11/12/24 10:19pm

Rice football lost another American Athletic Conference matchup last Friday, falling to the University of Memphis on the road, 27-20. The Owls’ defeat dropped them to 3-7 on the year, and with two games left, the best they can finish is 5-7.

While the cutoff for bowl eligibility is six wins, there’s still a path for Rice to make a bowl game. The NCAA sets a number of bowl games, and sometimes they can’t fill every game solely with teams boasting six or more wins. As a result, they pull from the pool of 5-7 teams to fill the bowl slots.

This season, the top 82 programs will qualify to play at least one game beyond the regular season: 12 teams in the College Football Playoff and 70 teams in non-playoff bowl games.

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Fortunately for Rice, the NCAA prioritizes issuing slots to 5-7 teams based on academic merit. The 5-7 programs with the highest Academic Progress Rates are allowed to choose a bowl game slot after other qualified schools have picked their slot. If there is one open slot, only the 5-7 team with the best APR gets a bowl game. If there are five slots, the top five APR 5-7 teams advance, with first dibs given to the program with the highest APR.

Implemented in 2003, APR measures academic success and is viewed by the NCAA as more accurate than graduation rates. 

The APR system “includes rewards for superior academic performance and penalties for teams that do not achieve certain academic benchmarks,” according to the NCAA. Each student-athlete receiving athletically related financial aid earns one point for staying in school and one point for maintaining academic eligibility. Then, the sum of the school’s points is divided by the total points possible and multiplied by 1,000 to determine their APR.

Given Rice’s academic standing, there’s a very strong chance they could have the best APR among 5-7 programs. Among 133 FBS programs, Rice finished the last reported cycle (2022-23) with an APR of 988, ranking 14th overall. While prominent, this was a significant decline from the 2020-21 cycle in which they ranked sixth with a 994 APR.

This year’s placement of 5-7 teams is based on APR from the 2022-23 cycle. The seven teams eligible for an APR-based slot that rank ahead of Rice are Northwestern University (4-5), the University of North Carolina (5-4), the University of Cincinnati (5-4), the University of Michigan (5-5), the University of Wisconsin (5-4), the United States Air Force Academy (2-7) and Wake Forest University (4-5).

While seven teams ahead of Rice might seem like a lot, APR only comes into play if a team finishes 5-7. If all of those seven programs were to finish more than five wins, and Rice won its final two games, the Owls would be the first 5-7 team offered a bowl game slot. 

Rice has made a bowl game in each of its last two seasons. In 2022, they finished 5-7 but qualified for the LendingTree Bowl based on APR. Thus, precedent exists for Rice to play a 13th game based on academic merit.

The bowl path for the Owls now depends on academics and games against two AAC rivals. Rice travels to the University of Alabama Birmingham (2-7, 1-4 in AAC) Nov. 23 before finishing the regular season at home against the University of South Florida (4-5, 2-3 in AAC) Nov. 30.

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