Eight Experts Predict Six Different Bowls for Cal

The college football season is half over, which means there should be some sense of where teams will be going for the postseason.

That’s not the case for Cal – at least not in the minds of the eight college football experts we cite in terms of their bowl projections this week.

The eight sites all agree that Cal will be in a bowl game, and the ESPN Football Power Index projects that Cal has a 73.5% chance of getting the six wins needed to become bowl-eligible. But the eight experts come up with six different bowls as the Bears’ postseason destination.

Only one bowl – the Independence Bowl – is mentioned by more than one of the experts as Cal’s postseason destination. More significantly all three of the sites that project Cal to end up in the Independence Bowl have paired Cal with the same opponent in that game – Kansas.

Cal is 4-2 overall and 1-1 in the ACC heading into Friday night's home game against North Carolina, and Kansas is 4-3 overall and 2-2 in the Big 12, so it’s matchup that makes sense.

But each of the other five experts predict that Cal will be headed elsewhere, with one putting Cal in the Hawaii Bowl and another in the Birmingham Bowl. Neither of those would seem like logical bowl destinations for the Bears, while the other predictions that Cal will be in the LA Bowl or Sun Bowl or Las Vegas Bowl seem to make a bit more sense.

After all, the latter three bowls -- as well as the Independence Bowl -- are among the six bowls that have tie-ins to teams that were members of the Pac-12 in 2023, which includes Cal. We note those six Pac-12-affiliated bowls at the end of this story.

Here are the bowl projections for Cal from the eight experts we cited (all times are Pacific times):

ESPN (Kyle Bonagura)

Hawaii Bowl – Cal vs. San Diego State

Wednesday, December 24

Clarence T.C. Ching Athletics Complex (Honolulu)

5 p.m., ESPN

ESPN (Mark Schlabach)

Las Vegas Bowl – Cal vs. Illinois

Wednesday, December 31

Allegiant Stadium (Las Vegas)

12:30 p.m., ESPN

CBS Sports (Brad Crawford)