[BostonCard]

That said, ESPN's win probabilities are often absurd, very frequently proven wrong, and I don't even know why they bother. It's like the algorithm has never heard the (tired) adage, "basketball is a game of runs." One and a half minutes before Virginia Tech was up 13, it was up 5. So going from up 13 to up 4 in another one and a half minutes is very predictable. From there, it's probably 30/70 to go from up 4 to down 1 in another one and a half minutes.

Except. Of course, a bunch of times that have been totally forgotten the miracle threes stop falling or the team ahead makes its free throws or just as mysteriously as it started, the run ends.  I can’t vouch for the math that ESPN uses; it could easily underestimate tail risk which happens a lot in these sorts of models that assume certain distributions of data that don’t wind up being accurate.  On the other hand, they probably have a database of thousands of games (there are 5800 D1 games a year), so having a team up by a dozen or more points with three minutes left is probably not an unusual situation.

BC

[BostonCard]

That said, ESPN's win probabilities are often absurd, very frequently proven wrong, and I don't even know why they bother. It's like the algorithm has never heard the (tired) adage, "basketball is a game of runs." One and a half minutes before Virginia Tech was up 13, it was up 5. So going from up 13 to up 4 in another one and a half minutes is very predictable. From there, it's probably 30/70 to go from up 4 to down 1 in another one and a half minutes.

Except. Of course, a bunch of times that have been totally forgotten the miracle threes stop falling or the team ahead makes its free throws or just as mysteriously as it started, the run ends.  I can’t vouch for the math that ESPN uses; it could easily underestimate tail risk which happens a lot in these sorts of models that assume certain distributions of data that don’t wind up being accurate.  On the other hand, they probably have a database of thousands of games (there are 5800 D1 games a year), so having a team up by a dozen or more points with three minutes left is probably not an unusual situation.

BC