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 quick look at our latest end-of-season projections (focusing on our “In The Conversation” metric). The aim, as always, is to project the teams we’ll be discussing as we head into the conference championships. Things may get muddier before it’s all over, but this week they seem to have gotten clearer. Seven teams have separated…
Quick update on our end-of-season projections, focusing on the “In The Conversation” (ITC) metric we discussed in this pre-season blog. The aim is to anticipate which 6-7 teams will the playoff debate focus on going into the conference championships. This is all based on the sim we slaved over in August, updated for what we’ve…
Rufus and I always enjoy the NFL post-season projections we update throughout the season. Frankly it might be our favorite product. This year we decided to put together something similar on the college side. But since the playoff committee lies beyond a humble quant’s domain, we have to approach it a little differently. Our projections…
Our playoff probabilities, still warm from Rufus’s sim:
Last week I posted picks for a bowl “confidence pool”. Those simply require ranking the bowls 1-40 in how confident you are in who the outright winner will be. You bet/get 40 points for your most confident, 39 for next, etc. Our usual rankings are fine for that and it adds some flavor to the…
Have been inspired this week to enter a bowl confidence pool. Crazy to try to predict bowls, we understand, but better our numbers than nothing, right? Well, we’ll see. We like that it’s confidence-based, and a reasonably big sample. And we like that it will add some flavor to the holidays. The usual details apply.…
Lots of questions the last few days so want to give you an update. Looks like we’re getting out of the pick-posting business for college games. Just decided midweek after line moves complicated our lives. There were hard line moves in our direction on FIU, Central Michigan, Idaho and Alabama after we finally posted our…
So you’re forecasting the season for the top 25 teams in college football. What do you think matters more, how good a team is or what kind of schedule they play? We all know strength of schedule matters, but how much? Might differences in schedule strength contribute as much to the final standings as differences…
For yesterday’s show on Wharton Moneyball I took a look at how expectations differed between “Experts” and “Algorithms”. I.e., the coaches and writers who vote in the two main polls versus analytics-based models like ours. To do this I just took the average points in the Coaches and AP polls, and compared that to the…
Howdy and welcome to the 2015 football season. Finally. As much as we like speculation, we’re very happy to have real football and real results on the way soon. We’ve posted our pre-season rankings and will have picks before Thursday’s openers. And then of course next week we’ll fold in the NFL. Our Top 25…