[lawrence-newsletter]This strange offseason has already seen ESPN’s predictive tools show the Badgers some love. It was only about a month ago when ESPN’s BPI, a basketball predictive tool that follows many of the same data points as the FPI for football, predicted that the Badgers would have been the 2020 NCAA champions in their one-time, simulated March Madness.
Now, the Badgers are seeing ESPN’s FPI give Wisconsin football impressive odds in each of their regular season contests. The FPI stands for Football Power Index, and is described by ESPN as follows:
“The Football Power Index (FPI) is a measure of team strength that is meant to be the best predictor of a team’s performance going forward for the rest of the season. FPI represents how many points above or below average a team is. Projected results are based on 20,000 simulations of the rest of the season using FPI, results to date, and the remaining schedule. Ratings and projections update daily. FPI data from seasons prior to 2019 may not be complete.”
Wisconsin not only is favored to win each of their regular season games, but when multiplying together all the win percentages we can calculate UW’s chance to have an undefeated season in 2020. According to those win percentages, the chance that Wisconsin football goes undefeated is 19.5%.
Here are the Badger win percentages for each individual game, per ESPN FPI:
Sept. 4 vs Indiana: 86.2% chance to win
Sept. 12 vs Southern Illinois: 99.5% chance to win
Sept. 19 vs Appalachian State: 92.6% chance to win
Sept. 26 at Michigan: 72.7% chance to win (lowest win percentage of any game)
Oct. 3 vs Notre Dame (neutral site game): 73.5% chance to win
Oct. 10 vs Minnesota: 88.9% chance to win
Oct. 24 at Maryland: 94.5% chance to win
Oct. 31 vs Illinois: 94.8% chance to win
Nov. 7 vs Northwestern (neutral site game): 82.2% chance to win
Nov. 14 at Purdue: 88.2% chance to win
Nov. 21 vs Nebraska: 91.9% chance to win
Nov. 28 at Iowa: 75.5% chance to win