“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action!”
— Ian Fleming
, Goldfinger
A simple, yet effective, measure of forecasting prowess is the mean absolute deviation (MAD). Yahoo’s computer projections for fantasy football do poorly on this measure. For example, one of my teams is thus far, through the first 11 weeks of this season, at 16 points MAD from an average projection of 70 per game. That’s an error exceeding 20%! But to make matters far worse, their forecast on this team is terribly biased. Given my indignation you can guess which way Yahoo has been erring (yes, I am a loser)—consistently over-estimating how points my players actually accumulate. Enough data has come in to make this statistically significant as indicated by the confidence interval on the margin of error (MOE) being below zero. Between my fantasy team and the Vikings it’s hard to say which is doing worse at underachieving. Thank goodness for the Minnesota Gopher gridioners exceeding all expectations. That is a ray of sunshine in a gloomy Fall for a football fanatic like me.