College Football Simulator Predicts 2015 Season

It's no secret that most sports fans are drawn to predictions for any given sport they follow, and college football fans are no different. People want to know how their team will do in a season, where they will finish in their conference, and what bowl their team could potentially end up in.

Enter www.PredictionMachine.com, whose motto is "We play the game 50,000 times before it's played". Started by statistician and sports writer Paul Bessire, PredictionMachine.com simulated the 2015 college football season 50,000 times in the hopes that they can come as humanly close to predicting the season as possible. Here's an excerpt from the site on how it works:

Just as the Predictalator plays any individual game 50,000 times before it's actually played, it can also play entire seasons 50,000 times before they are actually played. That is what we have done for the 2015 college football (FBS) season. The actual regular season and bowl schedules have been played 50,000 times, allowing us to compute likely records, expected bowl matchups and power rankings.

So this is good news for the Huskies right? I mean there must be a few scenarios where the offensive line meshes and UConn has two thousand-yard rushers and the defense turns into the '85 Bears, right?

Well, if it happened in their models, it didn't happen often, as they project UConn to finish 10th out of 12 in the American, with only SMU and USF below them. Believe it or not, this is actually an improvement from the AAC preseason media poll.

UConn/AAC Notes

• While looking at where the model places the Huskies, keep in mind that last season, this same site predicted UConn to finish fifth in the AAC and make the Military Bowl in Annapolis, MD against Rice. Maybe they swapped years?
• UConn is projected to only have the 7th best defense, and the worst offense in the conference.
• An impressive 8 schools in the conference are projected to go bowling.
• Cincinnati is picked to win the American, with Memphis winning the west division.
• The four teams in the CFB Playoff are Ohio State, Auburn, TCU, and USC. Ohio State beats Auburn and TCU defeats USC. Ohio State remains the only team to win the new championship trophy with back-to-back national championships.

UConn is ranked 104th in the country (out of 128). You can read the entire piece here.