2010 NFL Draft Breaks Viewing Record

The Associated Press reports that more than 45 million viewers watched a portion of last month's NFL Draft. The draft changed to a prime time format for this year, with round 1 on Thursday night and rounds 2 and 3 on Friday night, with rounds 4 through 7 on Saturday. This experiment of the NFL to leverage its popularity year round was successful. Last year, there were a record 39 million viewers, easily eclipsed by this year's mark. The NFL Draft has increased in popularity along with the rest of the league. In 2001, the draft attracted 23.5 million viewers. Viewership has just about doubled in a decade.

With this large viewership, the next step would be to craft a skill contest that could extract revenue from these rabid NFL fans. The game concept would allow viewers to win prizes by correctly predicting draft picks. There is a particular contest scheme that would work extremely well for the NFL draft, which will be discussed in a future post.

Horse Racing Still In Trouble

Horse racing in the US has been in trouble for some time. In the old days, racing was the only legal gambling activity in the US outside of Nevada. With the advent of expanded casino gambling, Indian casinos and lotteries - not to mention online gambling - racing is just one of many gambling outlets competing for market share.

In addition, the racing fan is older. A previous post discussed the age of racing enthusiasts. They're not getting any younger, which will be the end of racing if not reversed as generally dead people don't bet on the ponies, but have been known to still vote.

Not to brag too much, but I wrote a "critically acclaimed" post analyzing the racetrack industry according to Porter's Five Forces model. Who were the critics? Well they were a friendly audience to be sure, but I did receive positive feedback from a noted industry expert, who is quoted in the Casino Journal article which will be subsequently discussed.

Casino Journal magazine had a great article in its February 2010 issue regarding racing. The article does a good job of highlighting the indicators of racing's decline and does a fair job of analyzing why racing is in decline. Adding this blog's post regarding Porter's model will add additional color to the reader's inquiry.

What surprised me in a negative way was that my incorrect impression that racing handle was at least keeping static, albeit not growing. Not the case. The article states that total racing handle (i.e. bets) fell from $15.2 billion in 2003 to $13.6 billion in 2008. Even the off-track handle, which was supposed to be the strongest element (on-track handle was known to be an issue) fell from $13.3 billion in 2003 to $12.2 billion in 2008.

The article touts the promise of off-track betting, betting exchanges and racinos to help racing's future. Not including betting exchanges, the other concepts have been in place for several years and racing is still in decline. Betting exchanges have a flaw in that they are peer-to-peer bets with a low commission (takeout). They are not going to be able to generate sufficient revenue to save the industry and quite possibly will cannibalize the existing higher takeout pari-mutuel wagering base.

What is important to note is that none of these concepts do a thing to address the core issue facing horse racing - the increasing age of the racing enthusiast demographic. The sport needs younger horse players. No one has come forward yet with a concept that holds the promise to do that. There is a new concept that is in early stages of development that might "crack the code" to solve the need for new horse players while also generating increased pari-mutuel revenue for the industry.

References:

Doocey, P. (2010, February), Post Time for Change: Racinos won't save racing - Some fresh ideas might, Casino Journal.

NCAA Tournament Betting Values Results

Well the 2010 March Madness is over and let's find out the results of my previous post which identified some potential betting values. To recap, I bet a hypothetical $100 for Duke to win the tournament at 8-1 and bet $50 on the lower seeded choices to win their first game. I arbitrarily chose Richmond over St. Marys in their game (they played each other), but really I should have stuck with the underdog theme and chose St. Marys (which actually made it to the Sweet 16).

I didn't take a look at point spreads and just looked to see who won their game outright. So from that perspective, only Murray St in the lower seeds won their game. If you took spreads into account, I am thinking I would have picked up another game. So for the lower seeds, betting a hypothetical $50 on each of those 5 teams, I won two of those games, so overall lost $50.

But Duke actually won the tournament! With a hypothetical $100 on Duke at 8-1, that's a nice win. Overall, I bet a hypothetical $350, $100 on the tournament winner and $250 on the first round lesser seed game winners. On the lesser seeds, down $50, but on the tournament winner up $800 for an overall tournament betting profit of $750. Not shabby at all.

Next year, I'll perform this exercise again, but get firmer numbers on the point spread on the first round games. To see the March Madness bracket results, click here.

2009 Fantasy Football QB Prediction Results

In a previous post, I provided some fantasy football QB rankings and compared them to a couple of fantasy football magazines. The intent was to test the hypothesis that basically saying what happened last year would happen this year wasn't radically different from the "deep analysis" provided by fantasy football information sources, which you need to pay for. To recap the methodology stated in last year's post:

"I will take last year's QB rankings and use the premise that the rankings from last year will be the same as this year. There will be a couple of adjustments. If for example, a QB moves from one team to the other and will be the starter, I'll keep that QB at the same ranking, even though they changed teams. QBs coming back from injury will be replaced with the highest rank position from the best of their replacements (i.e. Brady for Cassel). They will be projected at the ranking level that their substitute had last year. Finally, I put in Mark Sanchez in the slot held by Gus Frerotte (#29). Frerotte is not in the league at this point and Favre is now in Minnesota.

Could that cause some inaccuracy? Yes, but to keep the level of my "expert analysis" to a minimum, I'll keep the adjustments paltry and simplistic. You will also see by doing this just the few instances where you can intuitively (i.e. for free) make your own adjustment and not pay $7.99 to read something you basically already know. I made one adjustment to be fair to the magazines, dealing with Brett Favre. They didn't have him in their top rankings so I assumed that they would placed Favre in the position of the top rated Minnesota QB (#27). "

"The stats were based on total performance (passing and rushing), not just TDs. The league I was in counted passing TDs for 3 pts instead of 6 pts, so QBs that maybe didn't pass as well but got some stats rushing may show up higher in this list than the rankings your league has. The ranking lists of the magazines also were based on a performance model, not just TDs, to keep the comparison consistent."

Here's the results for my projections and fantasy football magazines A and B (names omitted):

YouGaming Blog
Correct within 5 or less spots - 12 (40%)
Correct within 10 or less spots - 21 (70%)
Incorrect by 11 or more spots - 9 (30%)

Fantasy Football Magazine A
Correct within 5 or less spots - 15 (50%)
Correct within 10 or less spots - 24 (80%)
Incorrect by 11 or more spots - 6 (20%)

Fantasy Football Magazine B
Correct within 5 or less spots - 18 (60%)
Correct within 10 or less spots - 23 (77%)
Incorrect by 11 0r more spots - 7 (23%)

The fantasy football magazines were able to beat the performance of simply stating what happened last year would happen this year, but not by very much. Overall results to get rankings within 10 spots is pretty much the same. So, at least compared to the magazines considered, you could have simply taken last year's QB stats rankings as your cheat sheet and likely not done much worse. What this analysis doesn't take into account is the actual numbers produced by the quarterbacks. It could be that even though a QB is off by several spots in ranking, the actual difference in performance stats may not be drastically different, particularly after you get past the top tier of quarterbacks.

What is fairly consistent but not reported in detail is that after the top 20 quarterbacks, no one did very well in terms of accuracy. If a prognosticator could do a very good job of predicting quarterback rankings from 15 to 30, that would be a great value as often those players would be your bye week QB or your QB that can keep your team solid if your top QB on your roster has a nagging injury or a tough weekly matchup.

I may consider this year looking at actual projected stats to see how well the fantasy football magazines do in that area.