The inaugural Big Ten Football Championship game will be played later today with the Michigan State Spartans facing Wisconsin. You may remember than Michigan State won the previous meeting against the Wisconsin Badgers on a game ending "Hail Mary" pass that was caught and the receiver barely made it into the endzone. At the time I used that one play to bring up the issue of one play affecting an entire season. Now we have a chance to see how these two teams will stack up again in the Big Ten Conference Championship game later on today.
In order to do so, let's take a look at the two teams playing in the game with their production model overall, offense and defense rankings.
Michigan State is currently 10-2 and has played against a strength of schedule equal to 68.75 - slightly easier than average. The Spartan's best win was against #2 Wisconsin and worst loss was against #50 Nebraska. Michigan State currently has the #12 most productive team in the football bowl subdivision, with the #38 ranked offense and the #4 ranked defense.
Wisconsin is also currently 10-2. Their SOS is 72.38. As mentioned above, Wisconsin has the #2 ranked team in the nation with the #3 ranked offense and the #9 ranked defense.
Given Wisconsin's superior performance on the field, the model "predicts" that Wisconsin will win the inaugural Big 10 Conference Football Championship game later today.