The non-conference schedule is over for OSU and some things have changed since the last post. California pulled into a tie with Stanford, the Washington schools flip flopped, UCLA is getting better, and Utah upset Portland but still looks to tie our old record for conference futility.

But that is not why I am excited to post this today. The big news is how winnable the next 5 games have become.

According to the Sagarin Predictor ratings, and factoring in home court advantage, OSU is no worse than a 2 point underdog to any of the first 5 teams they play in conference (UW, WSU, Cal, Stan, UA). To me that is a coin flip. While OSU is on the short side of all of those predictions, the closeness of the spread leads me to believe that OSU can win the two home games against Cal and Stan.

There is a lot of talk of course about how weak the OSU schedule has been. Sagarin claims the OSU schedule to date is 331 out of 345. But statistics can help change that perspective too. Sagarin has three rating systems. One is called Predictor and it is based on margin of victory. This is the one I use in my spreadsheet to get these predictions for the conference. Another one he has is called Elo-Chess and it is purely based on win-loss. The third is what he uses and it is a combination of the two. But if you subtract the first two you get a new number I call Pre-Elo which gives an idea of if the team is doing what it should be doing. Below is a look at the conference Pre-Elo numbers. You will see that OSU is the most over-achieving team in the conference. This may be the number that shows OSU could win the first 5 games of conference, and then some.

Well without further ado, here is the Sagarin Conference predictions and the OSU schedule predictions.