BYU Football: The Cougars will play in one of these nine bowls

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SAN DIEGO, CA – DECEMBER 21: Jamaal Williams #21 of the Brigham Young Cougars carries the offensive player of the year award offstage after defeating the Wyoming Cowboys 24-21 in the Poinsettia Bowl at Qualcomm Stadium December 21, 2016 in San Diego, California. (Photo by Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images) /

With bowl eligibility clinched, BYU Football has to wait to find out where they’ll play in December. Here are the nine possible destinations for the Cougars.

BYU Football finds itself in a position it hasn’t been in for nearly a decade, wondering what bowl game they’ll be playing in.

With the Cougars’ win over New Mexico State, they’re bowl eligible. However, unlike all the other years of BYU’s independence they don’t have a bowl tie-in for 2018.

Why not? Well, the Cougars had an agreement to play in the Poinsettia Bowl this year if they were eligible, but that bowl no longer exists.

BYU was left blowing in the wind.

But as a part of their agreement with ESPN, the network has promised to make sure that the Cougars land in a bowl game if they’re eligible.

And this might be the best possible year for BYU to be without a tie-in. This has been a crazy football season, and it’s nearly a guarantee that multiple conferences will have less bowl eligible teams than bowl tie-ins.

Which means there are a number of possible places that BYU could be playing in December.

Nine of them, in fact.

That number will probably shrink after this weekend’s games, as most teams finish their regular season and a number of 5-6 teams either reach that magic number of wins or play their final game of 2018.

But for now, let’s look at the places that the Cougars are most likely to land, and we’ll break them down by the conference they would be replacing:

No Conference Tie-In

The Frisco Bowl – Frisco, TX

December 19, 6:00pm MT, $750,000 payout

This is the only bowl game in 2018 that doesn’t have tie-ins with two conferences. An American Athletic Conference team will take on an at-large invite, which could very easily be BYU.

Had all of the conferences been able to fill their tie-ins, it would have been a near certainty that the Cougars would head to Frisco, but with many other (and some better) options available this year, the chances of BYU playing in this bowl game aren’t nearly as definite.

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