On Wed, 14 Jun 2000, dennis roberts wrote:
> what approach would one take ... or approaches ... if the question you
> wanted to address was:
>
> in what sport ... say at the collegiate level ... is it most likely
> that an underdog opponent can knock off or beat ... the favorite?
>
> baseball, basketball, football, wrestling, tennis, etc. etc.
You might want to define the question a bit more closely. "Underdog"
and "favorite" are essentially defined by past performance, and tend to
mean different things at the beginning of a season (when they're largely
a reflection of LAST year's teams), in the middle of a season (when they
may actually vary wildly from week to week, and the variability may
differ systematically between sports), and at the end of a season (for
the Big Game). Likelihood of upset also must depend on how far apart
the underdog and the favorite are in terms of past odds, and on how many
teams are being considered in context. (For football at Yale and
Harvard, the Big Game is the last game of the season, it's between these
two universities' teams only, and no one is much interested in whether
either of them is underdog or favorite in the league as a whole.)
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