2011 Bowl Projections: Stellar Matchups And A Bama-Stanford Title Tilt

November means three things: turducken, Daylight Savings Time and bowl projections. It is time for me to unveil Vol. 1 of my own projections, though as with my weekly Heisman Watch column, I wanted to do things a little bit different. Instead of just looking at the rest of the games, making quick predictions and plotting out the bowls, I wanted to use two fun little tools in the arsenal: Adj. Score and momentum.

I wanted to utilize Adj. Score in the same way I did for last week’s Undefeateds column, and I wanted to more heavily weight recent results. Teams like TCU and Nebraska have built momentum in recent weeks while teams like Florida, Texas A&M and Tennessee are deflating. You can see the entire list of teams ranked by hotness (or notness) here. Some of the rankings are surprising (Army, UCF), some not so much (Alabama, Kansas).

As one would expect, this produces some interesting, unexpected results; however, the games at the top play out more or less as we would expect. Alabama is projected to defeat LSU at home, Oklahoma is projected (barely) to knock out Oklahoma State, and Stanford is projected sneak by Oregon in Palo Alto. That means we’re looking at an Alabama-Stanford title game, one that would be incredibly hard-hitting and perhaps only marginally watchable.

ACC Championship: Clemson over Georgia Tech (56% chance of winning)
Big Ten Championship: Wisconsin over Michigan State (61%)
Conference USA Championship: Houston over Southern Miss (68%)
MAC Championship: Toledo over Ohio (73%)
Pac-12 Championship: Stanford over Arizona State (74%)
SEC Championship: Alabama over South Carolina (88%)

And for what it is worth, Alabama is currently so far ahead of everybody else that they are given a 93-percent chance of beating Stanford. Ouch. Go ahead and begin mentally preparing yourself for that 28-13 bearhug.