Monday, February 7, 2011

Super Bowl, Championship Factors & Quant Facts Recap

Congratulations to the Green Bay Packers and their legions of fans.

Green Bay's Super Bowl victory drops our book's blog's record to 20-11 in "quant fact" predictions, still impressive considering that our championship factors sometimes make interesting predictions (like picking the underdog) based on a quantitative analysis of concepts of sports psychology.

As usual, even at a high level of competition, errors are often the deciding factors in championships.  It is notable that this is true not only for athletes, but success in many activities.  Athletes need to perform at a high level of competition while minimizing mistakes.  Some of the traits associated with "minimizing errors" include championship characteristics such as consistency factors, experience, and confidence.  

That is, players and teams that are experienced, confident, and good at the more "consistent" tasks -- will tend to make fewer mistakes and prevail.  The "quant facts" we have studied with respect to sports psychology help to "put the wind at our backs" -- and can be useful characteristics for any sports orgranization -- at any level.

In Super Bowl XLV, we predicted that the Pittsburgh Steelers would prevail based on a variety of championship traits.  Our factors showed that play-in and play-out, the Steelers would tend to control the game better -- and would tend to have fewer mistakes.  However, the game needs to be played out -- and in Super Bowl XLV, the Green Bay Packers made fewer mistakes -- and won the big game.