2013 College Football Bowl Score Projections

For the fourth year now, I have applied a score projection formula to the bowl season. It has been both pretty good and pretty consistent.

In 2010, it went 23-12 straight up and 19-14-2 against the spread. In 2011, it went 22-13 straight up and 20-14-1 against the spread. Last year, it went 24-11 straight up and 19-14-2 against the spread. In total, that's 69-36 (.657) straight up and 58-42-5 against the spread (.576).

You can see how it works by following the link in the first paragraph up there, but it's basically a way to predict games based on points score and points allowed with a fairly crude adjustment for opponent. I've attempted to fancy it up to make it less crude over the years, but I've found that the simpler method always wins. Go figure. If you're looking for a more intellectually rigorous (and apparently inconsistent), try Bill Connelly's F/+ picks.

This year, I am making these my entry into the Yahoo! bowl pick 'em group (don't delay, join today!). The contest doesn't use point spreads, but it does use confidence points. To deal with that, I lined the games up by margin of victory and gave the most confidence points to the largest projected MOV and went on down. See if your judgment is better than that of a systems administrator's dodgy math work.

The way to read this table is that the "Projection" column covers the games straight up and the "Pick" column covers the games against the spread. In the latter, I like to put "Team + points" to emphasize when the system picks an underdog. There is no special meaning beyond that. The colors, as they appear, will be self explanatory. The spreads are from 5dimes as reported here, and they reflect the lines as of the evening of December 16 when I finished the projections and got to doing this writeup.

The SEC doesn't come out of this looking so great, with a projected 5-5 record. It's really bad in the national title game, as the margin of victory there is the largest of bowl season by a touchdown. On the latter point, I will refer you to my SEC Championship Game post where I emphasize that the details of the formula make it bad for projecting games with teams like this year's FSU and Auburn. It picked Missouri back then, for what it's worth.