Post–Week 12 bowl projections: Where will Cal go with time running out?

CBS Sports continues to omit Cal from their bowl projections, either indicating they think there won’t be enough bowl spots for all of the bowl-eligible teams or predicting that we will lose our final two games of the season to finish 5–7.

247Sports repeats their prediction from last week—the Sun Bowl against the Miami Hurricanes (although their lazy writing means someone copy-and-pasted last week’s blurb, which is no longer applicable). We’ve faced each other four times with the last game coming in the 2008 Emerald Bowl; Miami is currently 6–4 overall (4–3 ACC).

Speaking of the Emerald Bowl, ESPN’s two predictions are both sending us to that same game under its current name—the Redbox Bowl. Kyle Bonagura has us facing the Illinois Fighting Illini (where Cal alumnus Austin Clark is the defensive line coach), which is currently 6–4 (4–3 Big Ten); Mark Schlabach has us paired up against the Indiana Hoosiers (7–3, 4–3 Big Ten). Cal is 3–7 historically against Illinois, but the Tedford-led Bears won our last two meetings. We also boast a two-game win streak over Indiana, but the stark difference is that we’ve only had two games and they were in 1969 and 1970.