Predicting Sports is a skill highly sought after in today’s age, with sports betting becoming exceedingly popular. A single person prophesying the fate of a team’s win-loss record or their success in playoffs and championships can secure riches on a college and professional level. However, how obvious is it the foretell team sports? Do these sports qualify as entertaining because they are based on luck or skill? It all boils down to two essential measurements, luck and skill. From there, one can easily decipher which sport is easiest to predict.

Michael Mauboussin’s skill-luck continuum

Basketball

Recently, many college basketball reports have defined Gonzaga as having the upper hand and most likely to win the 2022 college basketball championship. Given their history last season, Gonzaga’s skilled players are the reasons why they are favored to win. Compared to other sports, the same basketball players typically play offensive and defensive possession for most of the game. On the same token, basketball has more means to measure their player’s skills than other sports. MLB players play 162 games while the NBA players only play 82. Measurements and predictability will be more varied the more games played. However, it does not stop here. The sample size of games does not just explain why basketball is more accessible to predict based on skill. On average, NBA players take 200,000 shots every year. With shots constantly going up, basketball allows its athletes more opportunities to score and take the shots against the shot clock.

Tenis

When discussing predictability in sports and how skill plays a role, Tenis comes up in the conversation due to the number of athletes participating in the sport. Tennis players have to be highly skilled because there are fewer people involved. This is why we saw Serena Williams hold onto that number one rank from 2013-2016. Finishing on top for 186 consecutive weeks in tennis proves that a skill-dominated athlete produces more predictable outcomes in a sport based on skill.

Individual vs. Team Sports

Predicting individual sports, like swimming and track, are also based on athletes’ skills. Now runners and swimmers compete with the clock and are less focused on beating an opponent. In team sports, they have more players and more interaction within those players. The more players on a team, the more line-up changes and possessions. This leaves skill in the dust and allows luck to take over. MLB requires teams to have nine hitters on one team. Typically there could be one, maybe two, star hitters on the team out of the nine leaving the other seven to be average and weaker. The variance in players leaves the baseball game more up to luck than skill since those highly skilled players are not participating as much.

Across the Board

In basketball, the coach’s control over how long their skill players play is more straightforward than in a team sport like hockey. Hockey is very fast-paced and erratic, causing your star players to only be on the ice a short amount, decreasing the influence their skill could have on the game. A quarterback’s relationship with the coach can highly influence a game in football. Since the quarterback plays on every offensive possession, the quarterback’s skill can determine how well their team performs.

When betting on sports or simply trying to call the winner of a game, it is vital to remember which sports are easy to predict based on the sports skill or luck. However, sports would not be as attractive without the underdog stories and its surprise.