Saturday’s 40-21 loss to the University of Tulsa was certainly a hard pill for a lot of Lobo fans to swallow. It was billed as an important game, one that could ultimate define the course of the season. So from that, I decided to look into how much this game affected UNM’s chances of becoming bowl-eligible (i.e., winning at least 6 games).

First, I looked at what the Lobos’ chances were before this game was played. To do this, I used ESPN’s game projections based on their Football Power Index (FPI), which can be found here (Note: The Tulsa game probability is no longer shown, but it was close to 50%, which was the value I used). I simulated a million seasons where each game was decided by a weighted coin flip. That is, the probability that the Lobos won each game was given by the projection derived from both team’s FPI. I then added up the wins from each simulated season to give me a distribution of season win totals, which can be found in the plot below. The height of the bars gives the probability that the Lobos win exactly that many games. The red bars represent win totals where the Lobos are bowl-eligible, while the dark gray bars represent win totals where they are not.

So, before this game, the Lobos had an estimated 48.5% chance of being bowl-eligible. Now, once we take into account the loss to Tulsa, the plot looks like this:

The estimated chance of being bowl-eligible has now dropped to 34.4%, a decrease of 14.1%. That’s a rough drop, but it certainly shows that the season isn’t over yet. I think that a one-in-three chance of making a bowl game is a better situation than the Lobos have been in several years, so there’s still reason to be optimistic.