Update 14 Feb 2010: on further review, I had a bug in the program I used to generate the numbers I had originally posted here. I was picking games using the projection for the same season (rather than using the previous season's projection). Naturally, this made the picks look better than they should. I have updated the table below to reflect picking one season's games based on the projection from the previous season's numbers.
I've also added the results for the 2009 season.
Introduction
Part I: how Pythagorean Projection did over the 1994-2008 seasons (this also contains an introduction of what Pythagorean Projection is).
Part II: a team-by-team look at how Pythagorean Projection dis for the 2007->2008 season.
Part III: the 2008->2009 projections
Using Pythagorean Projection to Pick Games
In this post, I will look at how the Pythagorean Projection does in picking the winner for individual regular season games for the following season. The method is very simple: the team with the highest projection is picked to win.
The following table details the tallies resulting for this method for then 1994-2008 seasons. As usual, tie games are counted as a push.
The 'correct percentage' is then computed, using the usual (w+t/2)/(w+l+t) formula.
| Season | Right | Wrong | Push | Correct % |
| 1994 | 133 | 91 | 0 | 59.4% |
| 1995 | 125 | 83 | 0 | 60.1% |
| 1996 | 145 | 95 | 0 | 60.4% |
| 1997 | 129 | 109 | 2 | 54.2% |
| 1998 | 148 | 92 | 0 | 61.7% |
| 1999 | 124 | 108 | 0 | 53.4% |
| 2000 | 143 | 105 | 0 | 57.7% |
| 2001 | 137 | 110 | 1 | 55.4% |
| 2002 | 140 | 99 | 1 | 58.5% |
| 2003 | 136 | 120 | 0 | 53.1% |
| 2004 | 146 | 110 | 0 | 57.0% |
| 2005 | 149 | 107 | 0 | 58.2% |
| 2006 | 140 | 116 | 0 | 54.7% |
| 2007 | 142 | 114 | 0 | 55.5% |
| 2008 | 140 | 115 | 1 | 54.9% |
| 2009 | 164 | 92 | 9 | 64.1% |
Conclusion
As it turns out, Pythagorean Projection does a surprisingly good reasonable
job picking games (producing results a bit better somewhat worse
than last
year's regular season numbers for APR.
More on this in a couple of weeks. I will post the picks for Week 1 based on the Pythagorean projections from last season (as well as the Line picks as usual).
