Which sport has the most upsets?

Soccer is so low scoring that the results
of a match are less likely to reflect the
quality of the teams playing and more likely to
turn on a lucky shot or a momentary defensive
mistake.

Tyler, you missed a trick here; the clear implication is that all the regimes of draft picks, salary caps, etc etc that are used in the NBA and NFL to keep the sport interesting and the results equal, don’t actually work and these sports would be better off following the model of soccer which, AFAICT is the only major world sport to operate a genuinely free market in players.

Daniel, that implication isn’t clear at all. There are all sorts of differences between the NFL and the English premier league that could influence the number of upsets, with the difference in the sports played being the most obvious and probably also the most important. This study tells us very little about how the number of upsets in the NFL is influenced by its policies on the salary cap, draft, etc. It tells us even less about the other ways in which these policies are supposed to improve the league, like by creating more year-to-year variability in which teams are successful. I’m sure that there are some papers out there in the big ol’ literature on the economics of sport that are actually designed to assess the impact of these kinds of policies (like by comparing a league before and after it instituted a policy). If you want to argue that having fewer regulations would benefit the NFL (or the NBA), you really should be citing one of them.

The comment about not using the lines is halfway correct.

They are not trying to show to what frequency a team covered. They are just purely looking at upsets. For an upset the unfavored team must WIN.

Although the metric they used to decide who was “favored” should have been the vegas betting line. Record is a poor indicator of the favored team, for instance in basketball recently, teams in the East playing teams in the West may have a better record, but still not be favored.

Also with baseball and pitching, if a poor team has one ace pitcher, they may be favored on nights even when they play a team with a superior record.

I would have to say this flaw really makes any inferences that you can try to wring out of this pretty useless.

C’mon, this is yet another example of economists taking a decade to describe what is obvious to any informed current-day spectator.

OF COURSE football (soccer) has become more predictable — it’s become a game that is dominated by economics. Just as the NFL has super-market teams that can pay for superstars, so too has the European football leagues. Real Madrid, Chelsea, Bayern-Leverkusen are all leaders in their divisions for team revenue and player expense.

If an economist wanted to do an interesting analysis, then they should probably correlate the amount in revenue and/or player expense against this predictability function. I’d go further and say that looking at the income gap between top and bottom-ranked teams plus the increase in revenues league wide would determine when sports become predictable.

I mean seriously, it took a statistical study to figure this out? No wonder I never listen to economists…

oopdpa July 8, 2006 at 12:06 pm

this s my opinion one of the most physically demanding sports combined with mental handiness in all positions All the international robotics community’s attention recently seems to be focused on developing robots capable of playing soccer. That’s fine and good, but given the current state of the art the robot soccer competitions seem to lack the enthusiasm, energy, speed, and excitement of a good old fashioned knock-down, drag-out, quarterback and linebacker American Football – a robot game the Japanese have been playing for years, complete with kick-offs, touchdowns, and even cheerleaders!