Elldee Sports is predicting all five of the power conferences to have an undefeated member. The sad part is that the playoffs only have room for four. This will be another case of a deserving team not making the playoffs due to preseason poll positioning. The same teams continue to dominate the power conferences and continuously make the final four.
The Atlantic Coast Conference has been ruled by the Clemson Tigers in recent years and Dabo Swinney has built a monster in Clemson, South Carolina. They will once again go undefeated, beating Georgia to open the regular season and outscoring North Carolina at the end during the ACC championship game. The best over/under win total pick in the conference is North Carolina over 9.5. They have the talent to blow past that number of wins en route to a Coastal Division championship.
The Big Ten is once again led by the Ohio State Buckeyes. The Buckeyes are another team with a marquee non-conference match-up this year as they will easily handle the Oregon Ducks. They will coast through the rest of their schedule on the way to a fifth-consecutive Conference championship. The Iowa Hawkeyes will test them in the championship tilt but will not have enough firepower to hang with the mighty Buckeyes. The top selections for over/under win totals in this league are both under. Wisconsin has a solid team but will fail to reach the predicted 9.5 wins. The Michigan Wolverines have been sliding and will officially implode this season and get nowhere near the total of 7 wins.
The Big Twelve will be won by the Oklahoma Sooners, in a repeat of the past 6-years. The Sooners do not play a particularly strong schedule as they have no big-name out-of-conference matchups. The only team that can challenge them in conference is the Iowa State Cyclones. In fact, ISU beat Oklahoma during the regular season last year, only to fall in the conference championship game. History will repeat itself. Expect the Texas Longhorns to finally turn the corner with a few quality wins and reaching over the win total on a Vegas projection of 8 wins.
The PAC-12 is quite possibly the most unpredictable of all the Power 5 conferences. It seems that the winner of this conference is never who the experts predict. That happens again this season as the Elldee Sports Formula is calling for an unconventional prediction of the UCLA Bruins finishing the season undefeated and with a conference championship over the Washington Huskies. This is a tall order as the Bruins would have to defeat six pre-season ranked teams. Sadly, as an under the radar team, they would still not make the playoffs. The top over/under pick in this conference is, obviously, the Bruins as they will sail over the 7-win Vegas number.
Finally, the Southeastern Conference will be Alabama and everyone else. The Crimson Tide will finish with an undefeated regular season for a second year in a row. Georgia will once again squander a talented roster and lose in the SEC championship game. The over/under projections seem to be spot-on for this conference with the only outlier being the Texas A&M Aggies. Elldee Sports is predicting the Aggies to only have one loss, to Alabama, and finishing the regular season with 11 wins. That allows a 2-game cushion as the current Vegas over/under is 9.5 wins.
Elldee Sports
Elldee Sports 