It’s hard to believe — mostly because it’s currently November and not June — but the 2022 World Cup kicks off at Al Bayt Stadium in Al Khor, Qatar, on Nov. 20. The host nation will square off against Ecuador in the first World Cup match ever played in the Arab world. And the start […]
Truth No. 1: Most of us watch sports to see the unexpected. Truth No. 2: Plenty of us want to predict the future. Somewhere, where those two contradictory truths meet, there has been a movement afoot. For decades now, sports-crazed statheads — the sabermetricians and forecasters and moneyballers bent on winning their fantasy leagues, assembling […]
Truth No. 1: Most of us watch sports to see the unexpected. Truth No. 2: Plenty of us want to predict the future. Somewhere, where those two contradictory truths meet, there has been a movement afoot. For decades now, sports-crazed statheads — the sabermetricians and forecasters and moneyballers bent on winning their fantasy leagues, assembling […]
FiveThirtyEight’s men’s and women’s NCAA tournament forecasting models calculate the chance of each team reaching each round, taking into account a composite of power rankings, pre-season rankings, the team’s placement on the NCAA’s S-curve, player injuries and geography, where data is available. See our 2018 March Madness predictions.
We often hear announcers and commentators say a baseball team is “on pace” to win and lose a certain number of games, by simply applying a team’s current winning percentage over 162 games. Those statements may technically be true, but in a randomness-filled reality, they’re meaningless. Sabermetrics constantly struggles with randomness, an unavoidable fact of […]
