Bowl Game Projections: A Brief Bit of Bragging

As you may have noticed, I've pretty much bit the bag this season with my handicapping (as has my partner in crime), to the point that I've finally waived the white flag on the whole thing. So please indulge me as I brag about some predictions that I made earlier that have now come true. Thanks for the patience in advance.

Ahem.

You might remember a few weeks ago, with a couple of weeks to go in the college football season, that I gave a prediction on who was going to be playing where for every bowl game this season. Now the the regular season is complete and the match-ups are set, I went back to look and see how I did. Much to my amazement, I was pretty frickin' good:

Total Bowl Games: 32
Correctly Picked Both Teams: 15
Correctly Picked One Team: 15
Correctly Picked No Teams: 2

So, I had an almost 50 percent success rate at predict the exact match-up that was going to be taking place in the bowls. Keep in mind, this was on Nov. 26, before the chaos and confusion of the final week of games.

How good was that? I decided to go back and look at the bowl projections of the "experts" that had been made around the same time. The experts I found were: CFN.com, ESPN.com (Ivan Maisel and Mark Schlabach), CNNSI.com (Stewart Mandel) and MSNBC.com (Mike Woods). CBS Sportsline hasn't made their Week-by-Week projections available as far as I can see.

How did I stack up? I'll let you be the judge:

YOUR FACE IS A SPORTS BLOG

Both: 15
One: 15
None: 2
Pct. of Teams Correctly Placed: 70.3%

CNN/SI (Stewart Mandel)

Both: 15
One: 14
None: 3
Pct. of Teams Correctly Placed: 68.8%

ESPN (Mark Schlabach)

Both: 9
One: 21
None: 2
Pct. of Teams Correctly Placed: 60.9%

ESPN (Ivan Masiel)

Both: 10
One: 15
None: 7
Pct. of Teams Correctly Placed: 54.7%


MSNBC (Mark Woods)

Both: 8
One: 18
None: 6
Pct. of Teams Correctly Placed: 53.1%

CFN*

Both: 5
One: 15
None: 12
Pct. of Teams Correctly Placed: 39.1%

(*CFN stopped doing a projection the week before everyone else, forcing me to use one that was a week earlier. That's what you get for not working over the Thanksgiving holiday, I guess.)

Again, let's review:

ME: No. 1. EXPERTS: Nos. 2-6

Stewart Mandel and I were very close, and Mark Schlabach was the only other person to completely miss on only two bowl games. As for the rest...even with the one-week handicap, the CFN projections are a mess. Part of this is because they insisted on placing Boise St. into a BCS game, when they basically had no shot even if they had beaten Hawaii. I'll give Ivan Maisel some credit for being the only person to predict that Kansas would go to a BCS bowl instead of Missouri, which was either a bold prediction, or a careless one that turned out to be right.

What were the two I missed out on?

The Humanitarian Bowl: The big issue here is that I assumed that the bowl would select Boise St. as a natural fit to play a bowl game in Boise in order to assure a sell-out. I didn't count on the Hawaii Bowl swooping in to steal Boise St. away, leaving Fresno St. with a consolation trip to Idaho in December instead (albeit against a higher-profile opponent).

The Emerald Bowl: Again, same concept - I assumed that the bowl game based in San Francisco would wind up with Cal. However, I didn't count on Cal losing to Stanford, and basically making it real tough for the bowl to select them at 6-6 ahead of 8-4 Oregon St.

Much like a South Florida beating an Auburn, this is the type of win that builds credibility. I figure that I can make horrible predictions for the rest of the season now and I can point back to this as proof that sometimes, I get lucky.

Posted by The Duke of Everything at 10:35 AM