Ohio State (12-0) won our system’s regular season national rankings followed by Clemson and LSU. All three are 12-0 and the only undefeated teams at the FBS level.
With Alabama’s loss to Auburn, Georgia (11-1) and Oklahoma (11-1) moved into fourth and fifth rankings although both are threatened by #6 Utah (11-1) if the Utes dominate their PAC-12 showdown with #10 Oregon (10-2) on Friday. Other than the top three, Utah is the only top ten team with play-off level metrics in our system.
Last week was rivalry week and we don’t generally expect prediction accuracy to be as high as other weeks. However, our prediction Index did better than we anticipated as it finished 44-16 for the week and 640-196 (77%) for the regular season. With just the Army-Navy game to go, the 837 total predictions this season is 121 more than a year ago.
The system accurately predicted three upsets, including Boston College’s win over Pittsburgh, but missed on four others. The system missed the Texas Tech upset by 43 but the closest four predictions were:
Memphis over Cincinnati 34-24 (predicted 33-24)
Marshall over Florida International 30-27 (predicted 28-27)
Utah State over New Mexicao 38-25 (predicted 39-24)
Charlotte over Old Dominion 38-22 (predicted 38-20)
To see others, visit us here.
In the PAC-12 . . .
Utah’s crushing win over Colorado (5-7) was dominating but not something we didn’t expect. As a result, the Ute’s didn’t move from its sixth ranking.
Tenth-ranked Oregon (10-2) benefited from schedule reiteration to take a small step up from last week’s 12th ranking.
Except for firing its football coach, #25 USC (8-4) was idle but is the only other PAC-12 team in the rankings.
Washington (7-5) is the next closest with a 32nd ranking.
Tomorrow, we will post predictions for all conference championship games.
