Who the hell is gonna win the Pac-12 South?

As the calendar flipped to November, it looked like it was finally Utah’s time. Kyle Whittingham’s Utes have maybe been the most consistently solid team in the Pac-12 South; they are also the only team not to have won it.

After a brilliant October that featured blowouts of Stanford, Arizona, and UCLA and an arm’s-length win over USC, everything was aligned properly. The South stunk, and Utah was up to 12th in S&P+. This was the year.

The Utes responded to Oregon’s lead with a five-play, 60-yard drive that culminated in a Shelley touchdown. They tacked on a late field goal and survived, 32-25. And after two weeks from hell, they somehow remain the statistical favorites in the division from hell.

There have been some spectacularly strange division races this year, and while some have wrapped up (Northwestern won the Big Ten West), and others have a clear leader (Pitt is in control of the ACC Coastal), the Pac-12 South remains as messy as ever.

Three teams still have a shot. At 4-3 and holding a tie-breaker advantage over Utah, Arizona State controls its own destiny, needing only to beat Oregon on Saturday and Arizona the Saturday after to reach its second conference title game.

According to S&P+, though, the Sun Devils are projected underdogs against Oregon and are in a virtual tossup against UA. Controlling your destiny only means so much if you’re unlikely to win out.

There are, for all intents and purposes, four games in this race. Let’s see what S&P+ has to say about each.

It should be noted that S&P+ is not designed to take injuries into account, at least not before the team’s play is affected by the injuries. So while it is extremely confident in Utah’s chances of winning at a collapsing Colorado, maybe it should be a hair less confident, even if the Utes offense looked fine last Saturday.

Even if you tamp down that 78 percent win probability, you only tamp it down so much (again, Colorado is lost in the woods at the moment), and win projections suggest Utah is still very much in the driver’s seat.

Let’s look at the scenarios required for each team to win and the odds of each.

Here are the odds of each potential combination:

If you believe that Utah’s win probability against Colorado is more like 70 percent because of the injuries, that changes the overall odds to Utah 60 percent, ASU 37 percent, Arizona three percent. And if you believe that Utah’s chances against Colorado are more like 60 percent (I do not), that tamps the Utes’ division odds down to about 55 percent.

Regardless, if Utah handles its business in Boulder, the odds are good that ASU will lose one of the next two, and Whittingham will finally have his division title.