Predicting the Polls Week 11: Can Oregon break into the top 3?

By Chris Bruce and John Ezekowitz

This is the latest in our series of attempts to predict the college football polls. For previous weeks, see posts from week 10 week 9, and week 8 (which includes our methodology)

With the top-10 matchup between Stanford and Oregon and TCU’s upset of Boise State, we are sure to have quite a bit of shuffling in the polls this week. How far Oregon rises, or doesn’t rise, has the potential to affect the race for the BCS championship later in the season – and we expect them to come up just short of Alabama in the AP and Coaches Poll. Additionally, we predict Boise State dropping to the #10 and #11 spot in the AP and Coaches Poll, respectively, after losing to an unranked team, while Stanford will likely stay in the top 10 at #7 and #9.

Edit: The AP poll and Coaches poll have been released. In the Coaches poll we managed to get the top 13 teams exactly right, and our predicted poll points had an extremely high correlation of 0.992 with the actual results. The AP poll predictions also had the same 0.992 correlation and predicted the top 4 teams correctly, though we missed the exact predictions of spots 5 through 9 since they were so tightly bunched – Oklahoma and Arkansas were separated by a mere 13 points and Stanford and Clemson were only 4 points apart. Outside of those 5, we correctly predicted 8 of the other 10 top 15 rankings.

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