University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Analysis of Daily Illini College Football Predictions: Accuracy of Forecasters and Betting Line

Zhou, Yayu

Content Files
125684 (1).pdf

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/90257

Description

Title
Analysis of Daily Illini College Football Predictions: Accuracy of Forecasters and Betting Line
Author(s)
Zhou, Yayu
Contributor(s)
Hildebrand, A.J.
Issue Date
2016
Keyword(s)
  • probabilities
  • betting line
  • college football
  • prediction
  • accuracy
Date of Ingest
2016-06-09T19:39:55Z
Abstract
Each week during college football season, the Daily Illini (DI), the college newspaper at the University of Illinois, publishes predictions by sports columnists on selected college football games for the upcoming weekend. How accurate are these predictions when compared to the betting line (i.e., always predicting the favorite team to win), or to random predictions (i.e., predicting by a coin toss)? Are there significant differences in accuracies between games involving Illinois (or Big Ten teams) and games not involving Illinois? Are there significant differences in accuracies between individual forecasters? To answer these questions, we collected and analyzed Daily Illini college football predictions over the 6 year period 2008--2013. This data set consists of 1740 individual predictions made by 29 forecasters and covering 346 games. Our main conclusions are: (1) The accuracy of DI forecasters during this period was significantly lower than that of the betting line. (2) The accuracy of DI forecasters was significantly higher than that of random predictions. (3) The DI forecasters were significantly more accurate in predicting Illinois (or Big Ten) games than in predicting games not involving Illinois (or Big Ten) teams.
Type of Resource
text
Genre of Resource
Conference Poster
Language
en
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/90257
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2016 Yaya Zhou

Owning Collections

Undergraduate Research Symposium 2016 PRIMARY