Sports are unpredictable. But if you want to make a successful educated guess about a team’s future, remember this rule:
Good teams get worse, and bad teams get better.
This concept is called regression toward the mean, and is commonly applied to the stock market, but it is also surprisingly robust in many sports applications.
South Point Casino just released its win projections for the 2017 N.F.L. season. Each team is predicted to win a certain number of games, and bettors can put money on whether the actual number of wins is over or under that figure.