As you know, I like to predict things–often with little to no substantiation. I get away with this baseless speculation because I do it for free. If I were some professional working for, say, ESPN, I would be held accountable for my prog–what? No one holds them to any sort of standard either? Huh.
But I’m not one to sweep my failures under the rug, so let’s take a look at some things I predicted this year, and how they turned out (so far):
B1G Newbies:
Back in February, I took a shot at guessing how the two new conference head coaches would fare in their opening season. I thought Wisconsin would take a small step back under Gary Andersen and go 6-6. Instead, they went 9-3 and one of those was the Arizona State loss where what should have been a last-second Badger field goal attempt disintegrated into mass confusion thanks to probably the worst performance by officials ever. That was one of the losses I picked, though, so there’s that. I also correctly picked the Ohio State and Penn State losses.
On the other side of that coin is Purdue’s Darrell Hazell, who I thought would go 4-8. Instead, the Boilermakers won a single game, against Indiana State. Obviously, I had them winning that game too, but also thought they’d handle Northern Illinois, Regular Illinois and Indiana–games they lost by a combined 55 points.
Fraud Teams:
Faring much better was my annual Fraud list of teams that were undefeated after five weeks only to lose at least five games the rest of the season. Missouri and Houston managed to get themselves off the list by the Week 11 update, and of the six remaining teams, four have already lost their fifth game and Washington needs to beat BYU next Friday to avoid going full Fraud this year. The only team that won’t hit five losses is UCLA, who was almost left off the update. All in all, a pretty successful year for the Fraud List.
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