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Hunch Bettors Die Broker and Faster Than Most -- So What?

The best evidence I have ever found for ignoring all sports forecasting is my own record at it. Not because that's record's uniquely horrible, it isn't. But season after season, sport after sport, decade after decade, I always seem to wind up with about a .500 record. I strongly suspect all other forecasters (at least the ones who makes their predictions public) do the same. In other words, it's an exercise in flipping coins, so why bother?

Of course I still make forecasts. They're an accepted, no, mandatory part of the American sports dialogue. I do try to avoid them unless I can use them to illustrate some larger point about the sport in question, I see an overlay that defies arithmetic and common sense, or, most dangerously, I just get a feeling, a hunch so strong it overwhelms me.

The guesses based on instinct sometimes end as badly as you'd expect. The 2011 Rams were not a team to watch this season unless you paid to do it. But instinct does occasionally hit one into the upper deck. I called Super Bowl XXXII Broncos 31-Packers 24, and you can look that up in the Herald files for the paper the morning of the game.

As doubtless readers have guessed, instinct is gnawing at my good sense this morning. It has all week, a week that in self-defense I've spent time thinking about the non-Tebow part of the NFL schedule.

I love the Eagles to beat the Jets today. Love it. If there was ever a team with the sort of twisted self-esteem needed for a useless salary drive, it's Philly. If there was ever a team with a penchant for falling into open manholes while walking down Easy Street, it's the Jets. Those are about the most ephemeral grounds for picking an NFL winner I can imagine. They consume my psyche nonetheless.

It's probably a good thing bookies open early Sunday morning are kind of hard to find here in Lexington.

posted by Michael Gee @ 8:34 AM