Predictions Week 3: Creating Flow

[Yipyapper]

A popular opinion around Chief Delphi is that this season is great for upsets. The statistical accuracy of that sentiment is contentious, though. It depends very much on how you define your criteria. In 2012, the #1 seed won 43 regionals/districts (64.2%). So far in 2013, the #1 seed has won 11 regionals/districts (57.9%). The mean winning alliance seed in 2012 was 2.014, this year it's 2.737. There's movement towards the underdogs, but it's not huge. If you evaluate it based on which seed wins each elimination series, the difference is even less. In 2012, the higher seeded alliance won 70.0% of the time. This season, the higher seed is winning 67.4% of elimination series. Only time will tell if the variations here are just noise, or if Ultimate Ascent does (slightly) favor the underdog compared to Rebound Rumble.

First of all, I love reading these week after week.

The only thing I wanted to point out was the above blurb, since the results only go down by about 0.6 points seedwise for regional winners, but the big thing that was noted on CD concerning upsets was that the second week had a good number of sizeable upsets. The results you have include the 1st week, which fared much better for the higher seeds and skewed the overall data to favour the higher seeds.

Without the 1st week, the mean winners had a seed value of 3.364, which is more than a full seed below the 2.014 in 2012. This also doesn't show the details with the low seeds reaching the finals several times, which would show that upsetting teams in general (not just winning upsets) seems to be at an all-time or near-all-time high.