Maybe bowls do matter

It has long been my belief that bowl games from one season have nothing to do with the next (and Gator fans are praying that’s the case this year).I believe pollsters — whether they be writers or sports information directors or magazines or websites — place too much emphasis on the bowl games when making their top 25s for the next season.So I decided to do some research to back up my beliefs.I took the bowl games that weren’t in the College Football Playoff (way too serious to count as bowl games) from the 2014 season and looked at the winners and losers and how they performed the following year.As Charlie Brown used to say, “Tell your statistics to shut up.”Here’s what I found:* The winning bowl teams had better records than the losing teams in the following season 25 times. The losing team had a better record eight times. There were three ties.* Of the 36 losing teams in 2014-15 bowls, 19 of them had records of 7-6 or worse the following year. Nine of them had losing records.* Of the 33 bowl game winners, 16 of them won more than 10 games the following year.So was I wrong? The numbers seem to say so.Discuss.