As of this evening when they won the series against the Boston Red Sox, the Tampa Bay Rays have a 99.7% chance of making the playoffs, 78% chance of outright winning their division, and a 21.7% probability of winning the World Series. Just a wild dream of a fan? Nope - coolstandings.com says so.
The WSJ explains how they do it
"After each day of games, Coolstandings runs a computer simulation of the rest of the season one million times, using Pythagorean records and other factors including home-field advantage, strength of opponents and performance the prior season to calculate the probability of winning each remaining game. Coolstandings assigns more weight to recent games and regresses teams to the mean, based on historical data, to account for extreme results that arise by chance. For each of these virtual seasons, a playoff slate is assigned; a team’s postseason probability is the percentage of these virtual seasons in which the team is still playing in October."
They also crunch stats for Football and Basketball. Sorry, rest of world, only American Football for now :)
Update: a reader sent in another site which also covers the "other" Football
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