College Football Mathematical Preview 2021: The Big Ten
This summer, as is my annual tradition, I have been applying a set of mathematical tools to try to better understand how the coming college football season may play out. In part one of this series, I presented the first set of data from my simulation of the full season, and completed a full breakdown of Michigan State’s schedule. Today, it is time to take a broader look at the Big Ten.
The basic method that I utilize involves generating an average preseason power ranking of all 130 FBS college football teams using the consensus of the rankings from various magazines and websites. I can then project point spread and victory probabilities for every game in the upcoming season, including possible College Football Playoff matchups.
As an additional input to my model, I also add the historical uncertainty in the preseason rankings themselves. Finally, I perform 100,000 Monte Carlo simulations of the season in order to generate odds for various season outcomes.
The table highlights the consensus preseason ranking of each team (the main input to the simulation), the total number of expected wins for each team, my calculated strengths of schedule, and the odds for each team to win their division, the conference, make the playoffs or win the national title.
