THE BOWL ELIGIBLE BLOG

2026-27 College Football Bowl Tie-Ins by Conference

All 41 bowls for 2026-27 with their conference tie-ins, from the Dec. 15 openers to the CFP semifinals, plus the Pac-12 legacy rule that makes four of them confusing.

A bowl tie-in is a contract, not a suggestion. Long before anyone knows which teams are good, each bowl signs agreements with conferences, and in December the selections mostly sort into the slots those contracts created. That is why the full tie-in table is worth having in one place: it tells you where your conference's teams can land.

The 2026-27 slate in our data runs 41 bowls, from two openers on December 15, 2026 to the College Football Playoff semifinals on January 14 and 15, 2027. Six of the 41 are playoff games: four quarterfinals (Fiesta, Cotton, Peach, Rose) and two semifinals (Orange, Sugar). Their tie-in is simply "CFP Quarterfinal" or "CFP Semifinal," because the bracket fills them. The other 35 belong to the conferences below. For the refresher on filling one of these slots, see what bowl eligible actually means.

The full 2026-27 tie-in table

How to read this table

Three patterns explain most of the slate. First, the SEC and Big Ten anchor the top of the non-playoff bowl world: they meet head-to-head in the Music City, ReliaQuest, and Citrus Bowls, and the SEC alone holds ten tie-in slots in the table. Second, Notre Dame rides with the ACC. Seven bowls list an "ACC/Notre Dame" pool, meaning the Irish can be selected out of the ACC's allotment, which is how Notre Dame stays in the tie-in system without a conference. Third, the Group of Five bowls mostly draw from rotating pools instead of fixed pairings. A string like "CUSA/MAC/Sun Belt" on both sides means the bowl picks from that combined pool rather than owning one conference per sideline.

The Pac-12 footnote that matters

Six rows in the table say "Pac-12," and they do not all mean the same conference. Bowl Season extended the old affiliations one more year, so at four bowls (the Holiday, Alamo, Sun, and Independence) the Pac-12 slot belongs to the ten legacy schools: Arizona, Arizona State, California, Colorado, Oregon, Stanford, UCLA, USC, Utah, and Washington. Those are the programs that left, still filling the old conference's bowl contracts. The rebuilt Pac-12 appears in exactly two places: the Poinsettia Bowl, which takes the rebuilt conference's champion against the ACC/Big Ten/Big 12 pool, and the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl's pool.

What happens next

Tie-ins set the menu; records pick the meal. Once teams reach six wins, the bowls work their conference slots roughly in pecking order, the playoff takes its twelve, and the picture locks on Selection Sunday, December 6, 2026. That is also when our Bowl Futures game closes: you pick all 41 bowls before the announcements, each pick stamped with the price on the board when you locked it. This table is the cheat sheet. The picks are on you.