Welcome one and all to the first-ever Eleven Warriors Prediction Awards! I am your host, Orca, and have been compiling data on the score predictions of 11W users across the entire 2025 football season to determine who is the most accurate among us all. I have used this data to create several award categories, some desirable and some not so much, and will be presenting said awards in this post.
The data was sourced from Seattle Linga’s prediction threads, the Staff Pregame Picks article, and Large Father’s pregame thread, because he is treasured and deserves it. If you are making your score picks outside of one of these locations, I likely did not include it in my data.
Without further ado, let’s go!
11W PREDICTOR OF THE YEAR: JORDAN RAINES
Raines always showed up last on the Pregame Picks articles due to his last name being the latest in the alphabet of all staffers, but his predictions this year were anything but. He submitted a prediction for all 14 weeks, including showing up in the Linga thread once to submit his prediction when his score was not posted in the staff article. Raines’ predictions ranked in the top half of all users in 13 of the 14 weeks this year, with the one exception being an exact 50th-percentile pick of 38-10 against Illinois. This consistency helped him edge out second place, who we will get to in a moment, by just 0.08 average score points, and finish with an average score of 11.71 after penalties, lowest among all predictors this season.
STAFF PREDICTOR OF THE YEAR: MATT GUTRIDGE
We follow the NFL model here, where if you’ve won MVP you can’t also win OPOY, and that award goes to the next-best offensive player. Here, Gutridge is as worthy as a recipient as Raines among the staffers, finishing just 1 total point and 0.08 average points outside of first place overall. Neither of the top two predictors ever beat the other by more than six points in any given week, a margin that Raines won on Washington and Michigan, while Gutridge won on UCLA. Nevertheless, when the dust settled, Gutridge’s 11.79 average was second-best among all predictors this year and over 2 full average points ahead of third-place Chase Brown among the staffers, making this a deserved victory.
USER PREDICTOR OF THE YEAR: BULL1214
The first overall season leaderboard was created only after Week 4 this season (a trend that I plan to continue going forward) and Bull was in 15th among all users at that point. However, Bull had a hot second half capped by two perfect predictions in three weeks against UCLA and Michigan, something nobody else in my 5 years of data has ever done, which leapfrogged them over the pack and only behind the top two staffers. They closed out the season with better-than-average picks against Indiana and Miami to maintain their third-place spot and the best position among all non-staffers, finishing with an average score of 12.5.
LVP (LEAST VALUABLE PREDICTOR): SMARTONE29
I defined this category as the highest-average user who had predicted 10 or more of the 14 games this season and had not made any picks that were obviously jokes. Smartone finished with the highest average of all users who met these criteria. Their main fault was putting too much faith in a shaky Ohio State offense, which led them to miss badly on games like Washington (42-16, 28 points off), Wisconsin (56-0, 22 points off), Miami (34-3, 46 points off after penalty) and Michigan (63-10, 37 points off, though they acknowledged this as a spite pick). They finished with an average of 22.64, which would have been good for 4th place in the 2021 season. Predicting is much easier when your team has an elite defense.
This category (and most other "worst" categories that spawned from it) was suggested by Undercoverbuck.
LVS (LEAST VALUABLE STAFFER): ANDY ANDERS
Andy did not actually have the lowest average among all staffers, but it was clear that this award would have gone to him had it not been for staffers Chris Lauderback and Jack Emerson being left off the staff picks randomly for the final three games of the season. As such, I am giving this award to Andy, who finished with an average of 17.64, which was still good enough for the top 50 this year (giving you an idea of how good the staffers as a whole are). Andy was one of three staffers to incorrectly predict an Ohio State loss to Texas, resulting in a 35-point hit to his average, and also plummeted down the rankings after his 56-3 pick against Purdue was the third worst of the week. Andy began acknowledging this futility in the Pregame Picks article occasionally, and I have no idea if my posts had anything to do with that. Sorry, Andy.
UNBRIDLED OPTIMISM AWARD: SMARTONE29
UNBRIDLED PESSIMISM AWARD: RBLOODWORTH
No data backing up either of these awards, just vibes. Smartone, as established earlier, missed high in several of his predictions, and was who I considered the most optimistic of the non-joke predictors. Bloodworth’s pessimism has been well documented; though they did not predict the most Ohio State losses of anyone this season, they did consistently predict in a more pessimistic manner than the vast majority of users each week, including some outliers such as guessing the Ohio Bobcats would score 24 points and that the Buckeye offense wouldn’t break 10 against Michigan.
PREDICTION(S) OF THE YEAR AWARD: CLEVELANDBUCK93 (OHIO STATE 13, TEXAS 6) AND JACKTATUMSAFRO (MIAMI 24, OHIO STATE 13)
What I consider to be the two best predictions of the season happened in the first and last games that Ohio State played this year. The Texas game was especially difficult to predict, and that made ClevelandBuck93’s prediction of Ohio State 13, Texas 6 all the more impressive - they were one of only three predictors that had Texas scoring single digits against a new-look Buckeye defense and were six points closer than anybody else was. On the flip side, JackTatumsAfro was one of only three with the courage to predict an Ohio State loss to Miami and absorb the associated downvotes, and their score guess of 24-13 Canes was near-perfect. I consider these two predictions to each be great in their own ways, and so they share this award.
WORST PREDICTION OF THE YEAR AWARD: URBAN_CAN_RECRUIT (WASHINGTON 41, OHIO STATE 29)
There were many different contenders for this award, but this one sets itself apart by being the only one of 141 weekly predictions to actually pick Washington to beat Ohio State and for missing the Huskies’ score by a mere five touchdowns. Other contenders were Ramzy selecting a 49-3 Ohio State win over Illinois, ClevelandBuck93 picking Ohio State to beat Indiana 48-45, and anyone who picked Grambling State to score double digits.
MOST CORRECT PREDICTIONS AWARD: A BUNCH OF PEOPLE
Nobody correctly predicted the outcomes of more than 12 Ohio State games this year. We only had 3 people combined predict Ohio State to lose to either Miami or Indiana, and all of them had either missed games or incorrectly predicted losses earlier in the season. As such, this award could simply be earned by predicting Ohio State to win every game, which would net you a 12-2 outcome record.
MOST INCORRECT PREDICTIONS AWARD: URBAN_CAN_RECRUIT
Urban was the only predictor all season to get four outcomes wrong. In addition to the Washington miss mentioned above, Urban also predicted Ohio State losses to Texas and Michigan and added another miss in the Big Ten Championship. Despite this, Urban was one of three users to correctly predict an Ohio State loss to Miami and had the second-best prediction in that game, moving them up to 28th in the overall rankings, almost inside the season-long top 25.
JOKE PREDICTOR OF THE YEAR: GRATEFULBUCK
Since they get excluded from almost every other award on this list, the joke predictors deserve a little bit of love. Gratefulbuck earns the award for funniest joke predictor of the year, sprinkling in different scores with an over/under of 69 and adding in a small layer of ragebait (read: guessing 52-17 against Grambling State when 69-0 was right there, so as to not accidentally be right).
PLEASE CHANGE YOUR USERNAME AWARD: WE_HAVE_UP-TEMPO_DEFENSE
Please change your username. I can never keep track of the dashes and underscores and where they go.
NICEST PREDICTOR: PCOLA_BUCKEYE
Since there is no way we can have a non-subjective award given out here, this one goes to the poster who buttered me up the most throughout the season. As a bonus, Pcola also had the fourth-best overall average and the second-best among non-staffers at 12.79.
This award category was suggested by Undercoverbuck.
MOST HANDSOME PREDICTOR: PCOLA_BUCKEYE
Because I am unfortunately ugly on all weeks where my prediction isn’t perfect, I delegated the selection of this award to ChatGPT, who gave the following reasoning for handing Pcola their second straight award:
“The name has a perfect balance of sun-soaked Florida cool (“Pcola”) and Midwestern Buckeye grit. That combo gives off “effortlessly handsome guy who owns both sunglasses and a well-worn hoodie” energy. Also, the underscore implies confidence — this person knew exactly what they were doing when they locked in that username.
No spreadsheet columns for jawlines sadly, but if there were, this one feels like it’d be near the top. ”
This award category was suggested by Nafimafi.
SEATTLE LINGA AWARD: SEATTLE LINGA
And, of course, none of these awards would have been possible without the hosting and moderation of our own Seattle Linga, who will receive an honorary award at this show regardless of how good their predictions actually were. Everybody say “thank you Linga”.
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And that was the first ever 11W Prediction Awards! Let me know how much my picks sucked and what awards to include next year in the replies. Thanks for a fun season, everyone!
You can see the full data that I collected here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1g9E-XnmVmf4NTkyhUSWarqrYtnZku5INHrjopS1DN2A/edit?usp=sharing
