These guys provide interesting and fair analysis every week (highly recommend their content), so I was a tad surprised that they're predicting a closer game this weekend than most probably expect.

The biggest takeaway they have is that TTUN's defense is good enough to give them a chance and that this is Hairball's best coaching job so far. Whether that holds up by 4:00 Saturday I'm not sure (I'd doubt it, based on past history), but their computer model predicts 37-30 Ohio State. Interestingly, this lines up with this week's spread in Vegas, so maybe there's something there.

I'm personally predicting a score closer to Daniel's prediction (38-24) than Josh's (34-31), but I think this is a good reminder that when it comes to The Game, expecting a replay of the MSU game is probably unrealistic, especially since this will be in Ann Arbor.

What do you all think? Where do you disagree with their model? Any score predictions?

[Addendum: Thinking on this a little more at the end of the day, I guess what was most surprising was that 1. in past years these two have not been afraid of saying TTUN was overinflated rankings-wise; they're very much on board with the TTUN defense now. And 2. this is the same model that had a hypothetical Ohio State-Georgia matchup at 32-32 earlier this year.

I'm not one to overlook TTUN (every win over them makes for a successful season, in my book), but I thought the objective numbers would favor Ohio State a little more.

Also, IfNotBucksSparty made a good point that Josh and Daniel provide some good analysis of MSU's passing defense, and why people shouldn't dismiss Stroud's performance last week based on that. The whole discussion is definitely worth a full listen.]