Predicting Seasonal Performance in Professional Sport: A 30-Year Analysis of Sports Illustrated Predictions

Abstract

In 2017, Sports Illustrated (SI) made headlines when their remarkable prediction from 2014 that the Houston Astros (a team in one of the lowest Major League Baseball divisional rankings) would win the World Series, came true. The less-publicised story was that in 2017, SI predicted the Los Angeles Dodgers to win the Major League Baseball (MLB) title. Assessing the forecasting accuracy of experts is critical as it explores the difficulty and limitations of forecasts and can help illuminate how predictions may shape sociocultural notions of sport in society. To thoroughly investigate SI’s forecasting record, predictions were collected from the four major North American sporting leagues (the National Football League, National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball, and National Hockey League) over the last 30 years (1988–2018). Kruskal–Wallis H Tests and Mann–Whitney U Tests were used to evaluate the absolute and relative accuracy of predictions. Results indicated that SI had the greatest predictive accuracy in the National Basketball Association and was significantly more likely to predict divisional winners compared to conference and league champions. Future work in this area may seek to examine multiple media outlets to gain a more comprehensive perspective on forecasting accuracy in sport.

Multimodal Machine Learning for Major League Baseball Playoff Prediction

“…While the other results of [23,24,26,27] get results better than our because of additional optimization techniques used which in turn increase the latency. We find it interesting that for all four of our tests, regardless of which model we used nor if we optimized them or not returned with an exact output for each.…”

“…Justine Jones et al [24] presented a Sports Illustrated (SI) Predictions pre-season forecasting accuracy for four major North American sport championships over the last 30 years. While results varied across leagues.…”