Cade Massey is a Professor of the Practice at the Wharton School of Business. His research is on judgment under uncertainty, including overconfidence, optimism and under- and over-reaction. He is the co-author of “The Loser’s Curse: Overconfidence vs. Market Efficiency in the NFL Draft", co-host of "Wharton Moneyball" on SiriusXM 111, and co-director of Wharton People Analytics.
Thought we’d drop our projections early in the week rather than late. These are the 19 teams we see with at least a 2% chance of making the playoff. Playoff bracket currently goes Alabama-Oklahoma-Clemson-Washington. Both OU and Washington benefit this week from a conference rival weakening (Okie State and USC), bumping up in the pecking…
A quick look at the biggest surprise teams of the season so far. We judge this by how much we’ve revised our ratings about them, up or down. UCF, Purdue and North Texas top the list, while Missouri, Brigham Young and Bowling Green bottom it out. These ratings incorporate our priors, so are “dampened” relative…
A quick look at our projections heading into Week 5. The pool of serious contenders shrunk a bit more this week – down to 15 with >3% chance. The top stayed the same, with Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State and Oklahoma holding the 4 playoff spots and Washington & USC just behind them. Wisconsin gained some…
Quick look at our projections going into Week 4. You can read a fuller account in the Washington Post, where we’re doing a weekly summary on Mondays. You can also find our playoff bracket and a prediction engine at the Wall Street Journal. So far the playoff field looks pretty deep. We have 10 teams…
Big change to our playoff projections this week, with Oklahoma jumping to the #2 spot and bumping Ohio State all the way out. USC also jumped Washington to claim one of the 4 spots. LSU and Penn State sneaking up. Overall we have 19 teams with a >5% chance – this looks like a pretty…
Just going to drop this here for the record. These are the 24 teams our sim is telling us have a >1% chance of making the playoff. Week 1 managed to cull about 10 from that list, and bolstered the numbers on those at the top – we are ridiculously long on Alabama and Ohio…
We’re going to try to update this week feature weekly. At the moment we’re just dropping our summary in here, showing the 27 teams our models give >2% chance of making the playoff. We organized them by conference because that will be a critical dynamic in the playoff conversation. We include our current power ranking,…
To forecast win totals we simulate the season a few thousand times, accounting for opponent, game location and byes. In general, we expect better teams to have more wins, obviously. But there is a lot more variation in those expectations than you might expect. We can ask how many games a team *should* win,…
Here are our power rankings organized by conference (power-5 only – sorry, @PAPN). Decide for yourself, using the old eyeball test, what the conference pecking order is. I’d make it SEC>ACC>PAC12>BIG10>BIG12. Great way to see the distribution of talent in each conference. A few things that jump out to me: – The gaps Alabama…
Our current probabilities: Team Conf Alive Conf Champ SB Win NE 87.8% 63.0% 38.0% DAL 64.4% 38.6% 17.1% ATL 63.1% 29.7% 12.8% PIT 45.8% 15.6% 8.5% KC 54.2% 17.2% 8.1% SEA 36.9% 17.0% 7.7% GB 35.6% 14.7% 6.6% HOU 12.2% 4.3% 1.2%