We’re almost halfway through college football season, and that means the Big Ten conference is starting to take shape. It’s looking like Ohio State, Michigan, and Penn State are going to battle it out in the East for the division and conference crown to potentially stake a claim to one of the four College Football Playoff spots, but the West division is a different story.
We can’t really call the West wide open, but it’s clearly the weaker of the two divisions. Right now, it appears to be a race between Wisconsin and Iowa, but we could still see a surprise team rise up and make the finishing kick an interesting one.
So what will it all look like when the dust settles? There are models for that that like to predict how things will finish, and one of the ones we like to follow is ESPN’s FPI Matchup Predictor. We keep track of what it says about Ohio State’s chances of winning each of its remaining games, but we can expand it further and see what it says about every Big Ten team and the forecast for the end of the regular season standings.
We went through and ticked and tied all of the matchups based on the Football Percentage Index and are sharing what the “worldwide leader” predicts for Big Ten after Week 6. It’ll change week-by-week, but here’s how it sees each team’s remaining games going, and what the final standings will be in the Big Ten.
We’ll start with the West Division teams, move on to the East, then summarize the final standings.