Using Statistics to Predict NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision Bowl Game Outcomes

PAC Gym

For the past several years, professors at Furman have worked with ESPN on its annual Giant Killers project --- a project designed to predict upsets in the March Madness basketball tournament. In this project, we investigate how methods used in that project might translate into another area --- college football bowl games. Using a combination of standard football statistics (for instance, starting field position) and novel ones (for instance, Bill Connelly’s Efficiency and Explosiveness), we apply a variety of statistical and analytical methods to study upset probabilities in bowl games of recent years.