Anybody know if these are available anywhere? I heard a caller ask Matt Jones on his show today and Matt told him to go to the KSR shop and they were there but they arent. It is a different Belk Bowl hat. The ones the players were wearing were some of the best I have seen in awhile. One of the coolest parts of making a bowl game is reading about all the cool swag that the bowls give to the players. It’s one of the rare instances where the NCAA actually allows player gifts! Gear up for the big game when your team takes on its division rivals. Whether you cheer for your NCAA alma mater or your teams in the MLB, NFL, NHL or NBA, we have the sports apparel you need to show the world your team is tops. Hats off to our Seniors. All 39 bowl games before the National Championship game. To Josh Ali with 15 seconds left to win the game and catapult the Belk Bowl to No. 1 in our 2019-20 Bowl.

The teams that participate in the National Collegiate Athletic Association's Division IFootball Bowl Subdivision earn the right to compete in a series of post-season games called bowl games. As of 2017, there are 40 bowl games (not counting the College Football Playoff National Championship), and all are contractually obligated to offer bids to specific conferences, a situation known as a 'tie-in'. The 'top' six bowl games ('New Year's Six') in the nation select their teams as part of the College Football Playoff (CFP), which was put into place for a minimum of 12 years, beginning with the 2014 season. Prior to 2014, the top five games in the country were chosen under the system known as the Bowl Championship Series. The bowls outside of the CFP, have individual contracts with the conferences to offer preferential bids to teams from those conferences. As long as teams are bowl eligible, they may be selected by these bowls to meet these contracts.

College Football Playoff[edit]

The College Football Playoff consists of seven bowls: the Rose Bowl, Sugar Bowl, Orange Bowl, Cotton Bowl, Fiesta Bowl, Peach Bowl, and the College Football Playoff National Championship. For the 2020-21 season, the Rose Bowl and the Sugar Bowl will serve as national semifinals for the 2021 College Football Playoff National Championship in New Orleans, Louisiana, meaning that the teams ranked #1 through #4 in the final College Football playoff rankings will play in those two bowls, with the winners advancing to the CFP National Championship.

Twelve schools are selected for the major bowls. These include the champions of the Atlantic Coast Conference, the Big Ten Conference, Big 12 Conference, Pac-12 Conference and Southeastern Conference. The highest-ranked champion from the 'Group of Five' conferences (American Athletic Conference, Conference USA, MAC, Mountain West, and Sun Belt) is guaranteed a berth if the group's top team is not in the playoff.

The following tie-ins exist for bowls in the years they are not hosting the national semifinals:

Rose Bowl — Big Ten #1 vs. Pac-12 #1
Sugar Bowl — SEC #1 vs. Big 12 #1
Orange Bowl — ACC #1 vs. SEC #2, Big Ten #2, or Notre Dame
Cotton Bowl — at-large or 'Group of Five' (committee selection)
Fiesta Bowl — at-large or 'Group of Five' (committee selection)
Peach Bowl — at-large or 'Group of Five' (committee selection)

2020-21 'New Year's Six' bowl games[edit]

Games	First game	Conference	Conference
Rose Bowl Game presented by Northwestern Mutual	1902	National Semifinal Game	National Semifinal Game
Allstate Sugar Bowl	1935	National Semifinal Game	National Semifinal Game
Capital One Orange Bowl	1935	ACC	Big Ten/SEC/Notre Dame
Goodyear Cotton Bowl Classic	1937	At-Large	At-Large
Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl	1968	At-Large	Group of Five
PlayStation Fiesta Bowl	1971	At-Large	At-Large
College Football Playoff National Championship	2015	National Final	National Final

*The top Group of Five champion will be placed into one of the At-Large spots, when they are not selected to be in the CFP.

Bowl Championship Series[edit]

From 1998 to 2013, the national champion was determined on the field by the Bowl Championship Series. The Bowl Championship Series consisted of five games, the Rose Bowl, Fiesta Bowl, Orange Bowl, and Sugar Bowl, as well as the BCS Championship Game. A composite system of computer rankings and human polls was used to rank the teams in the Division I–Football Bowl Subdivision. As with the College Football Playoff, the BCS consisted the champions of major conferences, at-large teams, and occasionally Notre Dame or teams from mid-major conferences. Consideration was given to historic associations between the conferences and the bowl games themselves. Tie-ins still apply, unless a team obligated to a certain bowl game is selected for the BCS Championship Game.

Other Bowl Games in 2020[edit]

The bowls that are not part of the CFP have contractual ties to specific conferences. For the 2019–20 bowl season, all bowls have at least two tie-ins, meaning that there are no at-large spots open in these bowls, assuming that all conferences produce enough bowl eligible teams. Many bowls also have contingency contracts to offer spots to other specific conferences should their first choice not be eligible. If any slot cannot be filled by a contracted conference at all, then the spot becomes open, and the bowl can offer the slot to any eligible team.

To be eligible, a team must have at least as many wins against FBS opponents as it has total losses in the regular season (excluding the conference championship game), except that a team may count one win against an FCS team that has given out at least 90% of its allowed scholarships over the past two years (as some FCS teams have defeated FBS teams, most notably in the major FCS conferences that typically are in the NCAA championship final). There is one exception to this, as is the case with other sports that use a conference tournament; a conference champion is always eligible to play in a bowl game where the conference has a contract that requires its champion to play in that game. The exclusion of conference championship games was added after UCLA, which was the Pac-12 South representative in 2011, was 6–6 and lost the conference championship game that they participated only because of USC, which won the division that year, was on NCAA probation. The NCAA granted UCLA a waiver, and the exception appeared the following year, where the rule was used by Georgia Tech, the only eligible team among the three tied teams in the Coastal Division that was eligible for postseason because of NCAA probation, was also 6–6 and lost the conference championship game .^[1])

If, as happened in 2015, there are more bowl game openings than eligible teams, then additional teams can become eligible. They are divided up into four groups; all of the teams from a group must be chosen (or decline a bowl bid) before teams from the next group can be chosen. The groups are:

A team that does not have a 'counted' win against an FCS team, but beat an FCS team that did not meet the 90% scholarship requirement, and would have been bowl eligible had that game counted.
A team that plays 13 games in its regular season (excluding conference championship games, as that was previously referenced; a 13th game is possible if a team plays at Hawaii) and has a 6–7 record, since six wins is normally bowl eligible.
A team in the second year of an FCS to FBS transfer 'probationary period' that would have been eligible had it been a full FBS member.
If there are still bowl openings remaining, they are given to teams with a 5–7 record in order of their four-year football Academic Progress Rate (APR).

Note that, in groups 1–3, the teams can be chosen in any order, and the bowl games choose the teams; however, in group 4, they must be chosen in APR order, and each team chooses the bowl game in which it will play.^[2]

Belk Bowl Champions Hat 2019