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.
A painful 0-4 last week. Apparently we are the high-variance outfit this season. YTD we are 33-33-2 (50%), and 19-18-1 (51.4%) in the WSJ (they published no picks last week due to the holiday). For QBs we have Roethlisberger and Vick out, and the Niners playing Kaepernick. Quick note on line moves, which we accidentally…
5-2 last week, including our Monday post on the Niners, pushing our YTD to 33-29-2 (53.2%). We were 3-1 in the WSJ, so now 19-18-1 (51.4%) YTD. We’re still adjusting for the 4 big QB injuries. Present rankings assume Roethlisberger and Vick are out, and give Smith and Cutler a 50% chance of playing. As always,…
Now that the injury situation is clear we can make a final call on tonight’s game. Not that it’s easy to do. We make adjustments for QBs but there is considerable uncertainty, especially with QBs starting for their teams for the first time. Fortunately we have the Niners ranked much higher than the Bears, in…
3-5 last week. We hit some gloriously high-profile upsets (Saints, Bengals and Texans), but missed the others. In the WSJ we were 3-4. YTD we are 28-27-3 (50.9%) here and 16-17-1 (48.5%) in the WSJ. This week we are grappling with the rash of QB injuries. We detail this in separate blog posts, but our…
We’ll have our rankings up shortly but wanted to first post a short note about the QB injuries this week. We’re adjusting the rankings to reflect that Vick and Roethlisberger will be out and that Smith and Cutler are questionable. Given the uncertainty, the Niners’ and Bears’ rankings are the average of their rankings with…
5-0 last week! Our first undefeated weekend. Been waiting for that one. They’re tough to get, of course, but there’s so much chance involved that if you pick long enough the odds favor eventually getting one. We enjoyed it. Pushes our YTD up to 25-22-3 (53.2%). We were 4-1 in the WSJ (dropping a winning…
Beginning this week we are adding a couple of adjustments to our game predictions. Digging through historical performance we find that teams perform better in the week after a Thursday night game, and after a bye. In both cases, the effect is about 2 points. That is, teams coming off bye weeks or Thursday games…
1-2 last week, missing getting back into the black by a Dez Bryant finger or two. We’re now 20-22-3 YTD (47.6%). We were 1-1 in the WSJ, making us 9-12-1 YTD there (42.8%). As always, our lines are calculated directly from our power rankings – we don’t consider injuries, weather, matchups, etc. Lines are from…
A quick errata. We won’t adjust our record for this, but wanted to note it. We blanked on homefield for the Pats-Rams game last week. Rams were the official home team, so they (rotely) got the 2.44-point homfield advantage in our predictions for the week. On a neutral field we had the Pats by 9.6.…
Another off week and now we’re officially below .500 for the first time in our 2.5-year existence! Small samples, baby. Chagrined but not worried. We believe we’ve been on the right side of the market and it’s only a matter of time until a bit of the luck goes our way. 0-4-1 last week, including…