Stan’s Super Bowl prediction: Broncos 24, Panthers 13

We ran the data through our model, not just the data from the past season but from the past 17 seasons (that’s what we could easily access) with a Gaussian process model to allow team abilities to vary over time. Because we’re modeling individual game outcomes, our model automatically controls for imbalances such as Carolina’s notoriously easy schedule. And we don’t just model win/loss or even score differential, we model points for each team, which allows us to estimate offense and defense numbers for each team. Also we model separate scores (TD, FG, etc) so that we can get some shot at predicting the actual scores.

Our model isn’t perfect; there’s a lot more information out there we’re not using. No play-level data or even player-level data. Still, it’s what our model predicts: Broncos 24, Panthers 13.

P.S. (9 Feb) Hey, the game’s over. What actually happened? Broncos 24, Panthers 10. Pretty good! Actually better than we might expect—we got lucky. But we’ll take it.

Go Stan!

P.P.S. Damn! We forgot to preregister. But you can take our word for it that this is the only analysis we did with these data.

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