2013 Preseason Bowl Predictions Revisited

Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl: 2012-2013. Good riddance.

Let's be honest, sports media folk (especially bloggers), we like to think we're pretty smart. Every summer, media of all types try to pass the time stir the pot by making bold prognostications about the upcoming season. Of course we'll be posting our 2014-15 bowl projections soon. But what most writers won't do is go back and audit their previous predictions.

Maybe this is for good reason. Let's find out.

In our preseason bowl projections last year, we had…

Bowl Game	MBN Preseason Prediction	Reality
Rose	Ohio State	Michigan State
At-Large BCS	Michigan	Ohio State
Capital One	Northwestern	Wisconsin
Outback	Nebraska	Iowa
Buffalo Wild Wings	Wisconsin	Michigan
Gator	Michigan State	Nebraska
Meineke Car Care (Texas)	Minnesota	Minnesota
Heart of Dallas	Iowa	None
Little Caesars	Indiana	None

As you can see, I completely whiffed. Obviously I had drank plenty of the Northwestern Kool-Aid…

Northwestern is for real. (Read that line to yourself again, then read it out loud.)

Let me just say, if you remember a year ago...Northwestern was every media-type's darling to win the Legends division. What can I say, they seemed like a contender. And through the first 4 games of the year, up until that painful loss to Ohio State, they were. Then the wheels fell off as NU lost 7 games in a row.

And of course I had on my prescription maize-tinted Ray-Ban's.

I picked Michigan to get an at-large BCS bid. How will this play out? Well, if Michigan plays Ohio State twice, and M wins at home then loses in Indy, I suspect this will be the result. Both could finish with 1 or 2 losses.

It was so easy for me to see Michigan doing well last year that I was able to just gloss over just how inexperienced the interior OL was, and how that would truly affect this team. At least I was right about Ohio State finishing the season with a loss ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

No one saw Michigan State being as good as they were, especially after the first few weeks of the year when things looked a little iffy, so at least I'm not alone there. But I did have them as one of my potential B1G dark horses.

Wisconsin, Penn State and Michigan State are the wildcards in the conference. I think one could shoot up this list while two stay right where they are. Tough to predict these squads right now. Penn State is irrelevant anyway with the bowl ban.

I continue…

Indiana is my little engine that could. I think the bottom 5 teams in the league...Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa, Indiana and Purdue are all pretty interchangeable in the preseason. I also suspect the Gophers to have another bowl-type season.

Which they totally did! Score one point for Brad. And Indiana was certainly the engine that could...the only problem being they had no way of stopping anyone else. And another point to wrap up the post…

Let's be honest though, there's no way the Big Ten gets 9 teams bowl eligible.

Which of course, they didn't. But on a happier note, by adding Rutgers and Maryland, the chances of filling 2014-15's 9 possible bowl slots gets a little better.

I realize that this post doesn't make my predicting ability look all that great. However, I did finish the season with a 79-16 record in predicting every Big Ten game. That should buy me some cred.

How will my 2014 preseason picks look a year from now? Hopefully a little closer to actual reality. We'll see how it plays out.