The Ohio State football team stayed undefeated last weekend with a win over Wisconsin. That win will not win any detractors over, but it keeps the Buckeyes on the trajectory toward the College Football Playoff. Win and advance. All you have to do is look around the country and see many teams falling when they shouldn’t to understand that winning a Big Ten contest on the road is nothing to sneeze at.
Each week we like to check in on how the ESPN FPI (Football Power Index) changes the percentage chances of the Ohio State football team winning each remaining regular season game of the 2023 season. Now that we’re nine weeks in, there’s a significant set of data points to dump into the ESPN machine, and it’s that time of the week again to check in.
So far, believe it or not, ESPN’s crazy model that predicts future performance of a team based on current metrics in combination with its opponents has been very kind to the Buckeyes. It predicted them to win every game on the regular season schedule until last week.
The year-end donnybrook with Michigan is still to come, but before that, OSU has to travel to Piscataway to take on a Rutgers team that’s already clinched a bowl berth and is a much more formidable foe this year than previous ones.
Here is what the ESPN FPI matchup predictor says about each remaining game on the schedule and OSU’s chances of winning, including games against those Scarlet Knights, Michigan State, Minnesota and, of course, those Wolverines. We also take a look at how things might have changed since last week when we went through the same exercise.