Predicting the Big 12 race

The race for the Big 12 title is as tight as any in the country, with Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Baylor and TCU all within a game of the lead, and all with a case for the top spot. With this in mind, I used the PSR formula to predict out the remaining schedule for all teams, assigning win probabilities to each game. Let's see what the future holds! Below is a breakdown of each team's likelihood of a win in the remaining weeks. It should be noted that 1) this does not take injuries, such as those to Baylor QB Seth Russell, into account, and 2) these are all based on current standings. If Kansas destroys Oklahoma and OSU beats Tech 100-0 this week, these probabilities will look quite different next week. It's a living, breathing model. Now, without further ado:

For reference, here are the weekly schedules for these teams for the remainder of the season:

Week 9:

Oklahoma at Kansas
West Virginia at TCU
Oklahoma State at Texas Tech

Week 10:

Baylor at Kansas State
TCU at Oklahoma State
Iowa State at Oklahoma

Week 11:

Oklahoma at Baylor
Kansas at TCU
Oklahoma State at Iowa State

Week 12:

TCU at Oklahoma
Baylor at Oklahoma State

Week 13:

Baylor at TCU
Oklahoma at Oklahoma State

Week 14:

Texas at Baylor

So you can see that Baylor gets a boost from playing Oklahoma, arguably their toughest competition at home, giving them a predicted undefeated finish. With that said, the strength of their team is the offense, and their quarterback just went down. Baylor is a system offense that thrives with system quarterbacks, so we'll see how detrimental that actually ends up being, but it does make me least confident in the accuracy of Baylor's predictions out of these four teams. Oklahoma State gets both Baylor and Oklahoma at home, but their performance to date puts a decent-sized gap between both teams, and home field advantage isn't enough to sway things in their direction. Week 12 and week 13 should be huge, as we see these four teams playing each other both weeks. There are multiple games where the probability is only about 60-40 or closer, so this could definitely be an exciting finish.

Questions? Comments? Email me at penhawkrct@gmail.com, and follow me on Twitter @bl_analytics