2006–07 NCAA Football Bowl Games

2006–07 NCAA Football Bowl Games

The 2006–07 NCAA College Football Bowl Games post-season schedule followed the 2006 NCAA Division I FBS regular season in college football. The NCAA divided Division I into two divisions for football in 1978. The top level, originally known as "Division I-A" and officially changed to the "Football Bowl Subdivision" in 2006, includes teams that play in bowl games. The second level, originally known as "Division I-AA" and renamed the "Football Championship Subdivision" in 2006, consists of smaller schools and conferences, most of which play in a playoff system (although a few conferences, such as the Ivy League, choose not to participate in the playoff). The larger schools, who do not have a playoff system, concludes with a series of bowl games that have developed as a reward for teams that do well in the regular season.

The 2006–07 schedule served as the largest post-season lineup ever, with the addition of the new stand-alone Bowl Championship Series National Championship Game as well as four new games – the International Bowl in Toronto, Ontario (which is the first postseason game to be played outside the USA since the last Bacardi Bowl was played in Havana, Cuba in 1937), the Papajohns.com Bowl, the New Mexico Bowl, and the post-season-ending Texas vs. The Nation Game – all as part of a record 38 post-season games (32 not counting the post-BCS all-star games) that were scheduled between the Poinsettia Bowl on December 19, 2006, and the aforementioned Texas vs. The Nation Game on February 2, 2007. Thus, 64 schools out of the 119 schools in the Bowl Subdivision were playing in the post-season, thanks in part to the NCAA's decision to expand schedules to twelve regular season mainland games (not counting games either played in Hawaiʻi or conference championships in the ACC, Big 12, SEC, MAC or Conference USA) and allow teams with a 6–6 record to be bowl eligible if either the team or their conference has negotiated a bowl contract.