Remember this? #odds

[Gringo]

It appears to me that Silver is seeing how many times he can use his 'trick' (and trick is a science metaphor for technique or process to minimize confounding data) to to make a believable prediction. You don't see Silver (or his lab mates) running to Las Vegas to place large bets (even hedging them) based on his findings. He makes his money the old fashioned way, he swindles the gullible.

If you don't like the criteria he uses than that's fine, but his model is as good as anything else in my opinion.

Warren Buffet's whole premise for his billion dollar bracket was no one, statistician or otherwise could predict the tournament.

Randomness and unpredictability are what make sports fun:

 

[Kitaman]

First the chart, and now this thread gave me a headache. Damn, I've got to go find some 'smart' pills somewhere on the internet.

 

[brasssbonanzaa]

Needed a crystal ball. Could have made a killing betting U conn.

I stopped at the Caesars Palace book when I was in Vegas last August and happened to take a look at the NCAA champion line sheets at the time. We did not have a line placed on us at all - we were in the field at something like 300-1. There were probably 150-200 schools that did have a line, including schmucks like Boise State, Evansville, Montana, etc. so it was far from a a list of high level P5 teams. Checked when I was there a couple of months ago, we have a line for next year.

Re: Silver's numbers, he really is better with political forecasting than sports. Sporting events are far too volatile to hold up to probabilistic outcomes like his bracket percentages suggest. Those numbers are meaningless, really. There's far too many things that can happen to render worthless the past data used to arrive at those probabilities.