Simulation: Florida State goes 8-4 with Mississippi State's schedule
PredictionMachine.com simulated Florida State's season with Mississippi State's schedule 50,000 times.
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The first College Football Playoff rankings will be released Tuesday night, and there is a good chance Mississippi State and Florida State will be included in the top four spots of the committee's first official attempt to compare title contenders in 2014.
The Bulldogs and Seminoles are the last unbeaten teams from Power 5 conferences and both are led by star quarterbacks, but for the most part, the programs are in very different places right now.
Florida State won every game in 2013 and finished with an NCAA record for margin of victory as well as a Heisman Trophy winning quarterback. Mississippi State came close to missing the bowl season last year, upsetting Ole Miss in the Egg Bowl on the last week of the season to earn a Liberty Bowl bid. The Seminoles entered the 2014 campaign as a runaway ACC favorite and early shoe-in to make the College Football Playoff. Mississippi State was picked to finish fifth in its division.
But as the season reaches its conclusion, hypothetical matchups determine who has the edge between two teams. Our friends at PredictionMachine.com prefer simulations -- 50,000 simulations, actually -- to determine outcomes. Using the machine, John Ewing simulated Florida State's season using Mississippi State's schedule.
The result was roughly an 8-4 finish for the Seminoles.
In our ACC Preview before the season, we projected Florida State to finish 11-1. Against the Bulldogs' schedule, the Seminoles would be favored to lose in three games (@ LSU, @ Alabama and @ Ole Miss).
On average Florida State would finish with a win/loss record of 8.3-3.7. Against tougher competition the Noles' scoring average would drop to 33.1 points per game, a difference of more than a field goal from its current scoring average.
PredictionMachine.com also calculated Mississippi State's chances to win out in 2014. Even after the undefeated start, the simulation gives the Bulldogs just a 9.3 percent chance of finishing without a loss, due in large part to having just a 35 percent chance of winning against Alabama in Tuscaloosa.
