Houston Cougars Lose: How This Helps Michigan in BCS Bowl Bid

Southern Miss apparently forgot that they were supposed to let Houston crash the BCS bowl party. The Golden Eagles throttled the Cougars 49-28 to win the Conference USA championship, and likely pushed the Cougars out of the running for a BCS bowl berth.

Who will take that vacant slot?

There's good reason to believe the Michigan Wolverines will get the nod and provide a second BCS bowl for the Big Ten.

Anyone who even loosely follows college football knows that there are five BCS bowls. They are the Rose Bowl, the Fiesta Bowl, the Sugar Bowl, the Orange Bowl and the National Championship Game.

Elementary math tells you that 10 teams will be playing in those games. However, as most also know, that doesn't necessarily mean that those 10 teams will be the top 10 of the BCS standings. Bowl tie-ins make a big difference and the selection rules eliminate a good number of those teams regardless.

The Rose Bowl features the Big Ten Champion against the Pac-12 champion. The Sugar features the SEC champion, while the Orange Bowl ties into the ACC, the Fiesta hosts the Big 12 and the National Championship Game takes the top rated teams in the country, regardless of conference affiliation.

The BCS Bowl selection rules lay out exactly how all of this is supposed to work, and it's fairly detailed. However, if you follow the current standings and plug in the most recent winners and losers, you can start to draw a relatively clear picture of what could come out of the bowl selection process.

On any given year, there are four at-large positions available. This year, with the Big East not having a champion ranked within the top 20 (yet), there could actually be five available spots.

Obviously, LSU and Alabama will take up two spots.

The winner of the Big Ten Championship Game will take up a spot in the Rose Bowl, and Oregon has already locked down the other position in that one. The winner between Clemson and Virginia Tech will go to the Orange Bowl and the winner between Oklahoma and Oklahoma State will likely go to the Fiesta Bowl.

The opponents to face those conference champions are largely still up in the air.

Count on Stanford getting one of them as the Cardinal are currently ranked No. 4 in the BCS. If Oklahoma State loses to the Sooners, I would still expect them to get a BCS bowl berth. It just may not be the Fiesta Bowl they go to.

Boise State will now earn one of the "non-AQ" spots in the bowls and that leaves potentially two more slots to be filled.

With the selection rules stating that no conference can have more than two representatives in the BCS bowls, you can count out Kansas State, South Carolina and Georgia. Arkansas could also be counted out if LSU and Alabama don't fill out the top two spots in the final BCS standings.

That gets us down to the Big Ten teams in the current standings.

As mentioned, the winner of the conference title game will go to Pasadena. It doesn't necessarily mean that the loser will get another BCS bowl though.

Both Michigan State and Wisconsin have two losses on their record. So does Michigan. The loser of the Big Ten Championship Game will have three losses and put their winning percentage behind that of the Wolverines.

Then it comes down to who the selection committees might want in their bowl game(s).

It's awfully hard to vote against Michigan in this scenario. The Wolverines have an enormous fan base that would help sell tickets and would absolutely be a big draw on television.

Making the decision even easier is the fact that Michigan has been on a BCS bowl drought. They had been on something of a bowl drought altogether until they got back to seven wins last year and earned their way into the Gator Bowl.

Putting it simply, the fans are hungry for their Wolverines to be back in a bowl game in the national spotlight. An opportunity to showcase how far their team has come, in front of one of the largest audiences of the season, would be too much for fans to pass up and too tasty for bowl execs to ignore.

Had Houston dominated Southern Miss, this would have been a tougher sell. The Cougars would have automatically earned a spot in a BCS bowl as the highest ranked non-AQ team.

Then, Boise State is hard to overlook as well. They don't have the following the Wolverines enjoy, but with a one-loss record and a schedule that includes two ranked opponents, it's much tougher to make an argument against them than it has been in the past.

They've become something of a staple in the process and ignoring a Bronco team ranked inside the top 10 in favor of a Michigan team ranked outside the top 15 would be tough for even Boise haters to swallow.

Remember, they did beat Georgia to start the season and have dominated everyone except No. 18 TCU.

Now that the Cougars have taken a fall, however, their record looks more than a little flawed. And again, following the rankings, there are too many teams from the SEC and Big 12 ahead of Michigan to give any of them a slot. The BCS selection process doesn't allow for any of them to make a BCS bowl.

It really came down to Michigan and Boise State as the most likely candidates for the final BCS slot. Now that Houston has lost, however, there's an easier choice to make.

Putting Boise State into one of the slots, the argument now comes down to a 10-2 Michigan or a 11-1 Houston. Do you take the C-USA school that looked great against a ton of teams that nobody watches? Or do you take the Big Ten team that beat Notre Dame, Nebraska and Ohio State on their way to that record?

The only thing that could make that decision even remotely hard is if the West Virginia (Big East) somehow saw a huge boost in their ranking. As shaky as they looked against South Florida, don't count on it.

There's a very good reason to believe the Michigan Wolverines will back in the BCS this January.