Sports – FiveThirtyEight — Methodology RSS



How Our NBA Predictions Work

References Basketball-Reference.com / Real Plus-Minus Elo ratings / Monte Carlo simulations / Box Plus/Minus / Simple Projection System The Details FiveThirtyEight’s NBA predictions have gone through quite an evolution over the years. Our first iteration simply relied on Elo ratings, the same old standby rating system we’ve used for college and pro football, college basketball, […]

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How Our College Football Playoff Predictions Work

References Associated Press Top 25 poll / College Football Playoff selection committee’s rankings / Elo rating / ESPN’s Football Power Index The Details The goal of any statistical model is to represent events in a formal, mathematical way — ideally, with a few relatively simple mathematical functions. Simpler is usually better when it comes to […]

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How Our NFL Predictions Work

References Pro-Football-Reference.com Autocorrelation / Elo rating / Monte Carlo simulations / Regression to the mean The Details FiveThirtyEight has an admitted fondness for the Elo rating — a simple system that judges teams or players based on head-to-head results — and we’ve used it to rate competitors in basketball, baseball, tennis and various other sports […]

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How Our Club Soccer Predictions Work

References Engsoccerdata / Opta / Transfermarkt Harmonic mean / Massey’s method / Monte Carlo method / Poisson process / Ranked probability score The Details We first published FiveThirtyEight’s club soccer predictions in January 2017 with six leagues. Since then, we’ve steadily expanded the number of leagues we forecast, added features to our interactive graphics, tweaked […]

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What’s New In Our 2017-18 Club Soccer Predictions

We’ve launched a big expansion of our soccer predictions here at FiveThirtyEight. We’re now forecasting 24 club soccer leagues, with two more — Champions League and Europa League — to come in a few weeks. We’ve added leagues from South America (Brasileirão and the Argentine Superliga), along with 14 new European leagues, including five second-tier […]

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