Famed political predictor says interesting things about SEC teams

Nate Silver, famous for pinpoint accuracy in presidential elections, now runs FiveThirtyEight.com, a site affiliated with ESPN and Grantland.

Silver got his start in statistical analysis in economics and then baseball, co-authoring the critically-acclaimed “Baseball Prospectus” each year. Now he’s turned his brain to projecting college football.

Through Week 13, Silver projects Alabama has the best chance to win the national championship, but at just 27.8 percent. He gives the Tide a 75 percent chance of making the College Football Playoff and a 47.3 percent chance of grabbing the No. 1 overall seed.

Interestingly, he gives Mississippi State just a 27.5 percent chance to make the four-team playoff, worse odds than TCU (48.9 percent), Ohio State (43.5) and Baylor (30.8). His model gives Ole Miss a better chance to win the national championship, with both the Rebels and Bulldogs hovering around five percent.

It seems clear based on the numbers that his computer simulations project Ole Miss as a home favorite against Mississippi State.

After Alabama, Silver projects Oregon and Florida State as the two strongest teams in college football.

In addition to otherworldly accuracy, Silver is respected for his ability to explain the math in a simplistic way and interpret the subsequent charts in a nuanced and reasonable manner.

His college football model is “iterative and probabilistic,” he explains. (Try telling your friends that one at your tailgate or on the couch and see if you get any double-takes.) I’ll let him explain:

By iterative, I mean that it simulates the rest of the college season one game and one week at a time instead of jumping directly from the current playoff committee standings to national championship chances. By probabilistic, I mean that it hopes to account for the considerable uncertainty in the playoff picture, both in terms of how the games will turn out and in how the humans on the selection committee might react to them.