Sharon Katz, ESPN Stats & Information 9y

Football Power Index bowl projections

It is the most wonderful time of the year -- college football bowl season.

Seventy-six FBS teams will play in 38 pre-national championship bowl games with school and conference pride on the line.

Who will win these bowl games? ESPN’s Football Power Index has the inside scoop.

As a reminder, FPI is a predictive measure of team strength that can be used to project season and game outcomes.

It orders teams by which is most likely to beat an average FBS team on a neutral field. Using each team’s FPI and the site of the game (all bowl games are neutral-site), the system can predict the expected point differential and chance of each team winning in a matchup.

In the 2014 regular season, the team that FPI favored won 77 percent of FBS-only games, which is better than the win percentage of the Vegas closing line favorite. Bowl season is a little more difficult to forecast because there are far fewer mismatches than in the regular season. However, since 2005, FPI has correctly identified the winner in 64 percent of bowl games.

Last year was one of the toughest years to predict bowl games; there were 10 games in which the FPI favorite had at least a 75 percent chance to win, and four of them -- including Alabama and Baylor -- lost.

This year is expected to be a closer bowl season. There are three games in which the FPI favorite has at least a 75 percent chance to win and 12 games in which the favorite has less than a 55 percent chance.

Unlike last season, none of the New Year’s Six bowls have a team favored by more than 66 percent.

The projections for all 38 bowl games this season are below.

Here are a few notes that stand out:

• Marshall, Stanford and Georgia are the most likely teams to win their bowl games.

• FPI favors the SEC in 11 of 12 bowls. The only game it does not give the SEC more than a 50 percent chance to win is the Duck Commander Independence Bowl (South Carolina vs. Miami).

• Much like the lines in Vegas, FPI gives the Big Ten less than a 50 percent chance to win each of its 10 bowl games.

• Navy, Texas A&M, UCLA and Ole Miss are the four teams that are currently favored by FPI and are underdogs according to the Westgate Las Vegas SuperBook.

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