Humans vs. Machines: Football experts choose Clemson. Computers and Vegas back Bama
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Who will win the National Championship game between Alabama and Clemson on Monday night?
The verdict is in. The experts have chosen Clemson. The computers pick Alabama.
It’s the classic battle between a human forecaster’s intuition against computer generated game simulations and models.
Experts “Humans” narrowly pick Clemson
Up until Friday evening, January 5th, Bham Now tallied the published predictions for the National Championship game from college football experts at Sports Illustrated, CBS Sports and Althon Sports.
The results? From a total of 25 college football experts, Clemson was chosen to win 14 times to Alabama’s 11.
Here is how the predictions were broken out per publication (we’ve also hyperlinked the articles explaining their choices):
Sports Illustrated – Clemson 5 – Alabama 2
CBS Sports – Alabama 4 – Clemson 3
Althon Sports – Clemson 6 – Alabama 5
Machines back Bama
All is not lost for Bama fans, with computers firmly siding with Alabama to win. Here are results from two of the most prominent computer generated “prediction/forecast” websites.
Fox Sports – WhatifSports.com – The Fox Sports website ran 501 game simulations with Alabama coming out on top 58.1% of the time.
FiveThirtyEight – Nate Silver’s famous political site is actually very good at predicting football and baseball games. Their forecast for the Alabama – Clemson game is based on 20,000 simulations and numerous models. They give Alabama a 62% chance to win.
Clemson fans can find hope that this same website gave Hillary Clinton a 71.4% chance of winning the electoral college.
The tie breaker? Perhaps Vegas odds-makers.
In the end, perhaps the “wise guys” in Vegas can be the tie-breaker. According to bookmakers, the Alabama Crimson Tide is a 6.5 point favorite. They have held steady with that number now for over a week, despite Alabama’s Offense Coordinator Lane Kiffin’s departure on Monday.
Who will win Monday night? I think we can all agree it will be another close game like 2016 classic.
