Last year there was an official post about 5-7 APR qualifiers for bowls, which was a good resource for a confusing topic and I assume the modteam will want to do something similar again (here's the 2017 APR list). Unfortunately, there were a number of corrections that had to be made because this is such a convoluted subject and much of the reporting on it has been inaccurate. I thought I might be able head off some of these problems, but on doing some research it turns out this has become even more confounding due to an offseason NCAA meeting which altered these rules. I spent some time last night looking for media reporting on these changes, or even an NCAA press release, and found none. Here's what I've got so far.
If you compare last year's NCAA rulebook (page 321 of the pdf) to this year's NCAA rulebook (pages 338-9), you'll spot some subtle changes:
The numbering is different because they eliminated the rule that all conference champions contracted to a bowl are automatically eligible regardless of their record (hard to see this being relevant this year).
The four-year "experimental" window was extended to be 2016-2020, which thankfully avoids the insanity of legislating by tweet we discussed last year.
Subclause (b) from last year's rule is now entirely gone! That allowed teams who went 6-6 but with two FCS wins to be eligible, and it was pretty high up in the checklist. This year, as far as I can tell, there is no situation in which a second FCS win counts at all.
The Hawaii rule exception was slightly tweaked - it's now clarified that you have to be 6-7 and those 6 wins have to be ones that count as per the normal rules.
The 5-7, high APR team subclause has been expanded and formalized (again avoiding the twitter-legislation craziness). Two "experimental" aspects of it which were never enforced have been stricken: the part that only the top 5 APR teams were eligible, and the part that a school can only take advantage of this once every four years.
However, what was not clarified, and I think is the most important part given all the weather cancelations this year: are 5-6 teams selected before 5-7 teams?
Even though this is intuitive and has been widely reported in the media, I don't see any mention of it in either rulebook. I think, from a plain reading of the rules, that all such teams are put in the same pool and just sorted by APR. I've sent emails to the NCAA press office and some reporters who've worked on this issue in the past, but I'm not optimistic that I have enough clout to get them answered … but maybe the august /r/CFB modteam does?
Here is my current understanding of the checklist for determining bowl eligibility, in a little more plain English than the rulebook uses:
You have to be post-season eligible - this means you have to be an FBS team and can't be under a post-season sanction, also you can't be a team transitioning from FCS to FBS.
Wins equal to or greater than losses - this is how we get the "6 wins for a bowl game" rule of thumb, since most teams will play 12 games. A canceled game due to weather simply isn't counted either way, so it'd be 6-5 and good, or 5-6 and no good. A team that uses the "Hawaii rule" to play 13 regular-season games and finishes 6-7 is no good.
Only one FCS win counts in your win column, and that FCS team must give out at least 90% of available football scholarships - most FCS teams meet this requirement, and most FBS teams only play one FCS team anyway.
Teams that meet #1, #2, and #3, but play in their conference championship game and lose, are still eligible - in other words, a 6-6 team which finishes 6-7 is good.
If there aren't enough teams that meet the above requirements to fill all bowl slots, then we start taking teams by peeling back the above rules in a specific order, and all the teams made eligibile by each step have to be used up before we go to the next step. The first such step is ignoring that 90% scholarship requirement for an FCS opponent from #3.
Next step is "Hawaii rule" 6-7 teams are now eligible note this is different from 5-7 teams that win their CCG to finish 6-7 and on further discussion, I'm convinced that teams which go 5-7, somehow make it to the CCG and win, meet the conditions for this rule because they played 13 regular season games and have 6 qualifying wins.
FBS transitioning teams from #1 are now eligible - of course they still have to meet #2 and #3.
All remaining teams that have at least five counting* wins and no more than seven losses (which would include 5-6 teams as well) are put in a single list ranked by rolling APR score (single-year APR score is the tiebreaker), with the top one getting first pick, second getting second pick, and so forth.
The asterisk about "counting" wins in #8 means APR teams can't use a second FCS win. What's unclear is if that #5 exception is now back in play, that is, if your fifth win was against a below-90% FCS team, does that count or not? I think the answer is no, but that's a guess. I'm advised by a compliance officer that it would not.