Poinsettia Bowl 2010

Up-to-Date NCAA FBS Production Model Performance: Last night Boise State defeated Utah, bringing the model to 4-1 for the bowl season.

If you are looking for a bowl between two balanced teams (in terms of offensive, defensive and overall production), I do not think you will find a better NCAA FBS bowl this year than the Poinsettia Bowl. Here we have two teams with almost identically productive offense, defense and overall production. Thus according to the model, this game is a coin-flip, as either team is likely to win, and the outcome will likely be to some random event - like a turnover as opposed to one team having an advantage over the other. So here is the run-down of the production statistics.

Poinsettia Bowl: San Diego State (8-4) vs. Navy (9-3)
San Diego State (#34) overall in production has an offense that is ranked #36 and a defense that is ranked #46. San Diego State also has a SOS of 77.17, with their best win against Air Force (#23 in overall production) and their worst loss against BYU (#54 in overall production).

Navy (#32) overall in production has an offense that is ranked #34 and a defense that is ranked #45. Navy also has a SOS of 74.83, with Navy's best win against Notre Dame (#50 in overall production) and their worst loss against Air Force.

Thus based only on the production model Navy is overall slightly more productive than San Diego State, so the production model picks Navy as the winner of the 2010 Poinsettia Bowl.