You may remember (and given my predictions, you hopefully do not) that we gave our picks for the four conference champions, bowl game winners, and Vanier Cup winner here in August.
Pure random guessing would yield, on average, just under one correct answer out of seven, and if you assume the RSEQ winner takes the Uteck, and only one of five OUA teams has a chance at winning the Yates (which is probably being generous), then the expected number of correct answers is two.
So 3/7 is kind of the bare minimum for anyone wanting to show more knowledge than can be obtained through glorified coin-flipping.
Of course you can see where this is going.
If McMaster wins today, none of us will have guessed all seven correctly, and we will have averaged 4.4 correct winners. Myself, Perry King, Evan Daum, and Neate Sager will all have gotten just three correct. (UBC over McMaster in the Mitchell Bowl is all the evidence you need to tell me I shouldn't do any CIS football predicting anymore.) Three of our panellists would be tied for first with 6/7 correct: Brian Decker, Andrew Bucholtz, and Jim Mullin.
Should Laval win, that would make us look slightly smarter on average: five of us picked them as Vanier champs, compared to three for Mac.
And a Rouge et Or victory would also bring us to the headline above: Mr. Mullin is, so far, a perfect six for six on his playoff picks, the only one whose bracket hadn't fallen apart weeks ago. His strategy, whether intentional or not, was to pick every winner to be exactly the same as last year, which of course happened for the first time this year.
Those of us who chose two teams that finished a combined 6-12 to not only make the bowl games but win one of them stand humbled by Jim Mullin and his superior guessing.
I really WANTED different teams in there, but for once I used my head rather than my heart to pick teams.
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