Bowl season conference standings: SEC is king, Big 12 is perfect, Big Ten earns respect, ACC skunked

College football bowl season conference standings see the Big 12 undefeated, the ACC and Pac-12 shutout, the Big Ten earns respect and the SEC is still the undisputed king.

All that is left in the 2020 college football bowl season is the National Championship Game between the No. 1 Alabama Crimson Tide and the No. 3 Ohio State Buckeyes.

Though many teams elected not to participate in the bowl season this year, it is always interesting to see how each conference stacks up among the rest. While conferences like the Big Ten had a great bowl season, going 5-0 heading into the national title bout, there are conferences like the ACC who went winless, including both Clemson and Notre Dame losing by a combined 38 points in the College Football Playoff semifinals to Ohio State and Alabama, respectively.

Bowl season conference standings

• Big 12: 5-0
• MAC: 2-0
• Sun Belt: 4-1
• Big Ten: 3-1
• SEC: 6-2
• Mountain West: 2-1
• AAC: 1-5
• Pac-12: 0-2
• ACC: 0-6 (including both playoff semifinal losers)
• C-USA: 0-6
• Independents: 2-1

Despite being seen as the first Power 5 conference to be essentially eliminated from the College Football Playoff, the Big 12 dominated during bowl season with a perfect record. Teams like the Oklahoma Sooners, the Texas Longhorns and the Iowa State Cyclones looked impressive in their bowl games. Keep in mind Oklahoma and Iowa State won New Year’s Six bowls at that.

As it usually is, for someone to be good, someone has to be bad. Though the Pac-12 going 0-2 in its bowl games is not great, what is very hard to swallow is the ACC going 0-6 after they had an argument to make as the top conference in the regular season.

Ultimately, bowl season records are important because they are a way we can compare conferences and teams who rarely play each other, especially in this season when non-conference games were largely eliminated due to the condensed schedules due to the pandemic. Though not everybody is going to have a great bowl season, to see a Power 5 conference like the ACC potentially going 0-for, that is hard to process.

The SEC is still the undisputed king of college football and can punctuate that with Alabama winning the national championship on Jan. 11. However, if Ohio State can win the title, expect plenty of outcry from the south where they still don’t think the Buckeyes belonged. But after a season where they had to fight the Big Ten to even play this year, it’ll be a sweet reward if they are successful in slaying Alabama.

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