Year in Review: Those Who Can Do, Those Who Can't, Prognosticate

Many moons ago, when spring was in the air and hope sprang eternal, we here at the GRBG commissioned an AP-style poll of league owners asking them to take a shot at predicting the final standings. Eight of the twelve owners responded. For those with poor short- and medium-term memories, here is how the aggregate poll stacked up against the final standings:So, not so much. Regardless, we here at the GRBG wanted to give credit whwere it is due, and point out a couple of predictors who displayed well above-average accuracy. We used two metrics to measure how accurate picks were, which yielded two different "best" prognosticators.

First, we just looked at which owners got the highest number of exactly correct picks, and which most correctly predicted the teams who would hit the board. By that method, the winner is the Commish, who correctly called The Spam Avengers winning it all and the Gowanus Superfunders coming in third. He was also the only owner to exactly nail three different teams' finishing places, though because the third exacto ended up towards the bottom of the field, we will draw the curtain of charity across the details of that pick.

Second, we totalled up how far off people were across all of their predictions. To do so, we assigned penalty points for each slot a pick missed by (so if an owner picked Le Dupont Torkies to come in 1st, they'd get 4 penalty points for LDT's 5th-place finish in reality). By that method the most accurate predictor was Jake, who amassed only 28 penalty points. That means on average he was only about 2 slots off on each team, which is prety damn good.

Some other random notes:

- The worst predictors? Corey and Teddy, who got one board pick correct between them, and rang up 53 and 51 penalty points, respectively. While Corey's performance was slightly worse, Teddy's is probably more embarassing, given that he co-writes a blog which predicts and analyzes the damn league.

- The worst miss? Two different people had The Spam Avengers in 11th place, which was good for 10 penalty points. Again, curtain of charity.

- Jake and Sahil each correctly predicted their own finishing slots. Given where they ended up, one wonders why they didn't put their clairvoyance to work getting better players.

- Two different people predicted themselves to win the league. They were both wrong. Hubris, people!

We think that this worked out pretty well this year, and are leaning towards using this approach again next year. If you disagree, drop in a comment.