Boston.com is giving away $300 in Red Sox gear to the top predictor in their Red Sox Fan Predictions Contest. With all the external data (sports stats from news sources and the MBA) available and the scenarios mapped (in the contest entry form) for the Red Sox season, someone just might leverage Predictive Analytics to win. The entry deadline is tomorrow at 2 p.m. EST, about two hours before the first game at Texas.
We’re seeing the application of analytics more and more in sports. For instance, just last week on Trends and Outliers blog, we covered how “mathletics” superstars have used predictive modeling to select players and to feed USA Today stats for the sports pages. Earlier this month, we showed how TIBCO Founder and CEO Vivek Ranadive used our analytics solution to coach his daughter’s basketball team to a championship season, even though he’s never played the game.
And, we’ve covered how fans use BI applications to up their games in their fantasy football leagues and how to actually determine a college football champion via playoffs (instead of the complicated BCS). We’ve also highlighted John Ezekowitz (@JohnEzekowitz), a Harvard sophomore and Harvard College Sports Analysis Collective co-president. John recently completed a model that shows the likelihood of upsets in NCAA Basketball Tournament games.
So, the question is – in sports or in business, does data analytics help you cheat the system or does it give you a competitive edge? We think it’s a competitive edge and so do our government and our Fortune 100 customers.
The applications where we’ve explored the use of analytics are employed to help the company or sports team make the most of its resources and on-the-fly decisions. Or, it’s given a coach with virtually no experience a strategy.
As we’ve covered before, companies armed with data are going to win the value-based decision game. It’s not cheating the system, when you’re using all the data available to make informed decisions.
Data analytics technologies can be thought of as a huddle of coaches arming the head coach or the decision-maker with their best approach to win the game or get through a crucial play (or decision). However, the data analysis can only tell you so much – people have to make the decision. But it sure is nice to have data to back it up.
Amanda Brandon
Spotfire Blogging Team
