This is the same photo I used last year, because Northwestern led FBS then, too

What happens to bowl season if there aren’t enough college football teams with six wins or more? Since 2015, the NCAA’s allowed bowls to dip into teams with 5-7 records, with the leaders in multi-year APR getting first dibs. Ties are broken by single-year APR.

What’s APR? That’s Academic Progress Rate, the NCAA’s attempt to measure how well a program has done at advancing its athletes toward graduation over a rolling period of four years at a time. New scores are now out for every sport.

It’s essentially a pass/fail grade, with schools at the lower end being penalized — this year, Morgan State football, Alabama A&M basketball, and a few teams in non-revenue sports are postseason-banned because of it — and others proceeding as normal. Plenty of people have critiqued elements of the system, including its tendency to more harshly punish schools with resource disadvantages.

Based on this year’s Division I football list (in full below), the first 5-7 FBS teams to be in line for bowl bids would be:

Northwestern Air Force Vanderbilt Navy Duke Michigan Clemson And so forth

Of course, all of them hope to not need that lifeline anyway. I think Clemson is probably fine.

Updated NCAA APR rankings

In 2015, the first year of this new rule, all three 5-7 bowl teams won their bowls. In 2016, Mississippi State won while North Texas fell to a bizarre 5-8 record. 2017 failed to be blessed with 5-7 teams, so we’re due.