Assessing NC State’s bowl chances with four games remaining

All is not lost! (Technically.)

NC State’s loss to Boston College once again has the Wolfpack’s bowl chances looking highly precarious. At 5-3, finding one more win out of the last four games would have been plenty doable. But now they need two, and that’ll be tough since they’ll be underdogs in at least three of those games.

HOWEVA, there is still a 61.5% chance that the Pack finishes with six wins or more, according to the latest S&P+ numbers. There’s a roughly 58% chance that NC State finishes at 6-6 or 7-5, though also a 30% chance that State ends up at 5-7.

Here are State’s win probabilities for the last four games:

vs. FSU: 34%
at Syracuse: 61%
vs. Miami: 50%
at UNC: 36%

The odds of winning out, based on that, are roughly 4%, so I, uh, would not be counting on that to happen. Losing to FSU is not a nail in the coffin to the season, IF NC State can respond by playing a good game in the Carrier Dome against an inferior opponent. Beating the Cuse and Miami back-to-back is about a 31% proposition.

Grabbing those two toss-up games would qualify as a decent close-out to the season, though it isn’t quite what anybody had hoped for after the Clemson game. But they’re not going to get close to accomplishing that modest goal if they can’t get the offense out of its current slump.

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