Wake Forest Football: Most Likely Scenario in 2015

Yesterday Rob did a great job of looking at the 2015 Wake Forest football schedule and analyzing what the best possible scenario for the Deacs would be. He revealed that he thought the best case scenario would be a (presumed) bowl berth at 6-6.

One paragraph that I thought rang extremely true was the following:

Wake Forest will beat Elon, but I should add that's the only guaranteed win of the season.  I'm also going to go ahead and say that games against Florida State, Clemson, and Notre Dame are unwinnable, which means that Wake Forest must go 5-3 in the remaining eight games of the season in order to go 6-6. How can they do that?

As Rob astutely points out, there are 4 games that the fate is basically decided. That sets the Deacs at 1-3, with basically the other swing games coming in the first two months of the season.

The best way that I like to do this is to assign spreads to each game and then see how they correlate to winning percentages. I have done this in years past and believe it gives a fair indication of how the team will do this year.

So let's get down to it. Here are my predictions and the corresponding percentages for the "most realistic/likely scenario" for Wake Forest football this year. These are admittedly arbitrary numbers

Elon- 99%

@Syracuse- 40%

@Army- 60%

Indiana- 50%

Florida State-5%

@Boston College- 25%

@North Carolina- 20%

N.C. State- 40%

Louisville- 20%

@Notre Dame- 5%

@Clemson- 5%

Duke- 30%

Using this THOROUGHLY SCIENTIFIC method of probabilities, It comes out to 3.94 wins on the year, or right at 4 wins. I will be honest that I do not think we would win 1/20 games that we play against Clemson, Notre Dame, or Florida State, so I'm a bit overshooting that one, but it is negligible at the end.

The biggest games that will decide the fate of the team are @Army, @Syracuse, Indiana, and N.C. State at home. Most of the other games I don't like the Deacs odds in, and going 2-2 in those toss-up games, plus stealing one that isn't on my map right now would give Wake 4 wins.

The over/unders that I have seen have mostly been 3.5, and I agree with that wholeheartedly. I think I speak for all of us when I say that I am ready for college football and cannot wait for Thursday night at Groves Stadium!