Super Bowl Predictions And The Art Of Improving Government Performance

By on January 24, 2012 at 10:04 AM

With so much football playoff news lately, the one story that got my attention was one about the award-winning WhatIfSports.com simulation engine which concluded that the New England Patriots win 55% of the time by an average score of 27-25, based on 10,000 simulations. It’s not a stretch to see how sports simulations, and the data analytics behind them, might also be used to improve government performance.

Every week WhatIfSports.com simulates thousands of NFL games. WhatIfSports offers anyone a “test drive” of their simulators at no cost in a section called SimMatchUp. Users choose to play any two MLB baseball teams against each other going back to the 1885, NFL football teams back to 1941, NHL hockey teams back to 1917, NBA basketball teams back to 1950, and NCAA basketball teams dating back to different years depending on the team. All simulators produce complete box scores and full play-by-play.

With a 16-game season, users have the option of building a running game with Barry Sanders and Walter Payton, an aerial attack with Joe Montana and Randy Moss, or a tenacious defense with the 1985 Chicago Bears. Users set depth charts, game plans, offensive and defensive settings, deal with player fatigue and more.
For what it’s worth, EA Sports, which makes the Madden NFL game, has run its own Super Bowl simulations since 2004 and has correctly predicted the winner of six of the last eight games. The two it got wrong: last year’s Green Bay Packers win over the Pittsburgh Steelers and the 2008 game between the Giants and Patriots.
But if computers could predict who would win every time, it would take the fun out of all of this, just like the South Carolina presidential primary that everyone thought Governor Mitt Romney would win several weeks ago and was won by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich by factors that were not considered in the original predictions but showed up in the exit polling.

So the thought occurred to me: Lets apply this to improving government performance as the recent White House Blog about the Saving Taxpayers Money with Moneyball suggested and I wrote about: What Government Can Learn From Moneyball, Baseball Stats And Albert Pujols.

I recently read From Data to Decisions: The Power of Analytics and noted that it encouraged the following:

  • Developing an analytics mindset is a not a short-term effort, but an evolutionary process that takes time and commitment to performance management.
  • An analytics program does not have to start at the top. Performance improvement efforts can start small and grow via a pilot-program approach and should establish accountability for expected results.
  • No one enjoys criticism or failures, but agencies should regard those as opportunities to improve and invigorate performance management and analytics programs.

I endorse these recommendations and suggest we get going with analytics to improve government performance with the same intensity as the sports world.

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