College Football

Alabama over Ohio State for 2013 title, says computer sim

The computers like the Crimson Tide over the Buckeyes. What do you think?

By Peter Berkes Aug 15, 2013, 2:13pm EDT

The 2013 BCS Championship Game will be an Alabama win over Ohio State, according to predictionmachine.com. The site simulated every game in the upcoming college football season 50,000 times, and here's how it played out:

In the most likely BCS Championship game, Alabama tops Ohio State, to give the Crimson Tide a third consecutive National Championship [...] Alabama wins the game at the Rose Bowl 71.8% of the time and by an average score of 31-16 (yeah, not so close). [...]

In other BCS Bowls, the Big Ten Championship game loser, Nebraska, falls to the Pac-12 champion, Oregon in a Rose Bowl shootout 38-27. The Sugar Bowl features the SEC Championship runner up, Georgia, overcoming the Pac-12 runner-up Stanford with a 33-31 Bulldogs victory. In another great offensive battle, ACC winner Florida State bests Big 12 runner-up Oklahoma State 31-30 in the Orange Bowl. And Big 12 winner Texas puts away an overmatched Louisville team that rides an easy schedule and conference ties to make a BCS bowl with a 35-27 victory in the Fiesta Bowl. Meanwhile, Texas A&M (#2), South Carolina (#6) and TCU (#9) are top ten teams from our Power Rankings that narrowly miss making BCS game appearances. And lastly, for the fun of it, a four-team playoff with these results would likely see Alabama (#1) taking out Florida State (#4) and Oregon (#3) defeating Ohio State (#2) to set up an Alabama vs. Oregon National Championship.

Those all seem like logical picks, so it's hard to say this projection is out of whack. The only major discrepancy between these projections and the projected standings from the SB Nation team blogs is in the Big 12, where our bloggers predicted that Oklahoma would win the conference. We also projected Oregon as Alabama's opponent in the BCS Championship Game, not Ohio State.

For your records, last year Prediction Machine picked USC over Alabama.