No one will ever mistake the Harvard Crimson for the Alabama Crimson Tide on the gridiron, but that doesn’t mean the Ivy Leaguers don’t know something about football.
That’s especially true when talking data and probabilities.
The Harvard Sports Analysis Collective (HSAC), a student-run organization at Harvard University dedicated to the quantitative analysis of sports strategy and management, released “A Way-Too-Early Prediction of the NFL Season” this week using a more mathematical method than some talking head on TV.
Now you’ll need a degree from the college to understand fully how HSAC’s Kurt Bullard crunched the numbers, but the bottom line is the Giants topped the NFC East in the three main categories of the feature: Approximate Value (AV), ELO Rating (a head-to-head calculation originally developed for chess players by the physicist Arpad Elo), and odds to make the playoffs.