In football, Stern's rudimentary statistical approach does nearly as well as the experts and considerably better than the strategy of always picking the home team, particularly when scores are used. A similar pattern occurs in the other sports. The best prediction approaches are just a bit better than using coin flips to predict. In basketball and football, prediction accuracy can reach 75 percent, but that still leaves plenty of uncertainty. Stern, H.S. 1997.
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Ivars Peterson is the mathematics and physics writer and on-line editor at Science News. A Mathematical Safari by Ivars Peterson.