Updated Big Ten projections through 7 weeks

Again, we start with the use of a fun new slider tool. On the left are my Big Ten projections from three weeks ago; on the right, today. Poor Indiana.

Win projections

(Note: this week's F/+ rankings are the first of the season to include special teams as a standalone component. Adding that meant for some strange movement unrelated to the actual games on the field in Week 7.)

Poor Northwestern's reign as West Favorite ended with a kick return touchdown. Thanks to decent odds of beating either Minnesota or Nebraska, Northwestern's win probability was 5.46 a week ago. As I mentioned then, that's great as long as you actually beat Minnesota or Nebraska. Now that they fell to the Gophers via late kick return, their wins have fallen to 4.73, fourth in a suddenly crowded West.

EAST
Major contenders: Michigan State, Ohio State
Minor contenders: none

Penn State let one get away in Ann Arbor; a win would have kept the Nittany Lions within Minor Contender range, but alas. Barring some craziness from Rutgers, we're looking at a winner-take-all battle between Michigan State and Ohio State in East Lansing on November 8. You probably didn't need win probabilities to tell you that.

(Rutgers, by the way, is indeed 24th in the latest rankings. The Scarlet Knights have a top-20 special teams unit, top-40 offense, and top-40 defense. No major strengths, few weaknesses. And they're still in the wrong division if they want to win a title.)

WEST
Serious contenders: Minnesota, Nebraska
Minor contenders: Iowa, Northwestern

The West is a couple of upsets from becoming a giant mess. Let's walk through this scenario with the above projections:

* Purdue beats Minnesota. Shut up, it could happen. Purdue's been ... not terrible lately.

* Northwestern beats Nebraska.

* Iowa beats Maryland.

With the numbers above, that means means that you'd have the following distribution of win probabilities in the West: Northwestern 5.50, Iowa 5.46, Nebraska 4.90, Minnesota 4.84, Wisconsin 3.46, Purdue 3.37. That's four teams within 0.66 wins of the lead and six within 2.13 with still half the conference season to go. The numbers at the bottom of the post tell us there's about a 0.8% chance of that happening, but let's root for that, huh?

Sure bets

Here are the remaining in-conference win probabilities, broken into ranges.

70+% games: Nebraska 5, Ohio State 4, Michigan State 3, Minnesota 3, Penn State 3, Rutgers 2, Iowa 1, Michigan 1, Northwestern 1.

Minnesota is a game up on Nebraska at the moment, and that's a very good thing for the Gophers because Nebraska is a favorite in each game the rest of the way (and a reasonably heavy favorite in five of six). Minnesota, meanwhile, has two potentially likely losses: Ohio State at home and Nebraska on the road. Might need to win one of those two to stay at the top of the West list.

Slog Level Delta

Here are the odds of a division champion finishing with a particular record:

Barring the crazy-unlikely picture I painted above, we're looking at a 7-1 East champion (shading toward 8-0) and either a 6-2 or 7-1 West champion.

Odds of Big Ten conference records

All Projections