Ok, ok, let’s try to make some sense about all of this bowl talk for Mississippi State after their 55-20 lambasting of Ole Miss last Saturday.
Even though the Bulldogs finished the season with a 5-7 record and were obviously not bowl-eligible by record alone, they just might become eligible, very likely actually, by having a high APR. APR stands for Academic Progress Rate, which is a term-by-term measure of eligibility and retention for Division 1 student-athletes that was developed as an early indicator of eventual graduation rates. 
As I type this article, there are 80 bowl spots to fill and only 76 qualifying teams to fill them, which would allow a 5-7 team to sneak in. There are 11 teams in the nation that are currently 5-7 entering Week 14 of the college football season, and they will be picked by highest APR down until the spots are filled. Of course, a team could decline an invitation if they do not want the bother, but there are not too many coaches out there that wouldn’t take advantage of 15 extra practices to ready themselves for the bowl game and to get a jump-start on Spring Training.
The 11 teams that are currently 5-7 are listed with APR in parenthesis: SMU (945), Texas (971), Texas Tech (941), North Texas (984), Akron (947), Northern Illinois (970), Nevada (949), California (960), Arizona State (960), Mississippi State (971) and Ole Miss (958).
Mississippi State and Texas are both tied with an APR score of 971, but the Bulldogs will get priority for a bowl over the Longhorns because they have the highest most recent single-year APR score (970-968). If three teams are needed from this point on, Texas will be the first of those three to get in. Confused yet? Looks like the Bulldogs are going bowling and from what I’ve seen so far it could possibly be the Las Vegas Bowl on December 17, against Wyoming. So there you have it, just when Bulldog fans thought the Egg Bowl was their final game it’s looking more and more likely that those student-athletes from what some fans call Stark Vegas could possibly be making a trip out to Las Vegas.
It’s easy to overlook because we only see the on-field performances from our favorite student-athletes but sometimes when a season didn’t quite turn out like we had hoped, it surely did in the classroom.
So if the grades are good, five wins just may be that magic number.
