5 college football teams that can make their first New Year’s Six bowl this season

Sam Howell and North Carolina may be Clemson’s top threat.

This is the easiest one to pick. Someone has to play in the Orange Bowl out of the ACC, right? It won’t be the Clemson Tigers, who will surely represent its Power 5 conference in the College Football Playoff for an unprecedented sixth year in a row. Last year, a good, but not great Virginia Cavaliers team got to play in the Orange Bowl. This year, it could be the North Carolina Tar Heels.

As with the AAC’s Cincinnati Bearcats, North Carolina plays in the right conference, in the right division and has the right head coach to get to a high-profile bowl game. The ACC will get a team into the Orange Bowl because of contractual obligations unless the selection committee really feels like pretending the Notre Dame Fighting Irish are full-time members of the ACC.

Despite having a brutal non-conference slate with dates at the UCF Knights and vs. the Auburn Tigers in a neutral-site affair in Atlanta, the Tar Heels can conceivably win all their conference games this fall. The road date at the Miami Hurricanes will be incredibly tough, but the winner of that game gets to be cannon fodder to Clemson in Charlotte a few weeks later. Yay for that!

But perhaps more than Luke Fickell, the Tar Heels have an incredible head coach in Mack Brown. This will be his second year back at North Carolina after being out of coaching for a few years. His team nearly beat Clemson at Chapel Hill a season ago. With Sam Howell as his sensational sophomore quarterback, North Carolina can win the Coastal Division and play in the Orange Bowl.

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