When, where and who will Illinois football play this postseason? The waiting game continues.
Sunday morning’s latest reports have the Fighting Illini locked into the Music City Bowl in Nashville, according to On3Sports and CBS Sports, but the opponent is still up in the air given the fluid College Football Playoff field.
Nothing is official, of course, until the Illinois athletics department announces the team’s bowl destination later Sunday.
We’ll keep this page updated with any information, rumblings or interesting tidbits we see leading up to the announcement.
Notre Dame football left out of CFP
The Notre Dame football team was the last team out of the 12-team College Football Playoff, ceding the final at-large berths to Alabama and Miami.
CFP chairman Hunter Yurachek said that BYU’s loss in the Big 12 championship game allowed Miami to leapfrog them and move next to ND.
“Once we moved Miami ahead of BYU, we had that side by side comparison that everyone had been hungering for with Notre Dame and Miami,” he told ESPN. “You look at those two teams on paper, and they’re almost equal in their schedule strength, their common opponents, the results against their common opponents. But the one metric we had to fall back on, again, was the head-to-head.”
CFP field is set
Miami replaced Notre Dame as the final at-large selection and James Madison made the field as a second Group of Five representative in the final College Football Playoff rankings.
Alabama’s inclusion in the field will set off a bit of a domino effect as the SEC teams fill in their bowl games.
Coaches poll released
Not much different here than the AP poll. Indiana is No. 1. You can see the whole poll here.
AP poll released
Indiana took over as the new No. 1 in the latest Associated Press poll, released Sunday morning. The voters also placed Miami ahead of Alabama. Illinois was among the teams receiving votes. You can see the full poll here.
Latest bowl projections
CFP selection show: When is the bracket out?
The final College Football Playoff top 25 rankings and the CFP playoff bracket will be released this morning. The selection show and bowl breakdown show airs on ESPN from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
This article originally appeared on Journal Star: Illinois football bowl projections, live updates for Fighting Illini
Reporting by Wes Huett, Peoria Journal Star / Journal Star
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
