MGoPredictions Survey 2015

note: TL;DR at bottom

Yay! I finally have enough MGoPoints to post a new thread! For those of you who have already seen this in one of the "There are..." threads, I apologize. I am sure that there are lots of users who avoid those or who don't read every comment, so this is for you.

A few weeks ago, I was listening to a podcast on NPR (http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/08/07/430372183/episode-644-how-much-does-this-cow-weigh) about a phenomena that a crowd trying to guess the value of something will get amazingly close to the actual value when you average out all the answers, even if no individual has any expertise in predicting that value. They asked their listeners to guess the weight of a particular cow they had taken a picture of. When they averaged out all the answers, it was within a few pounds! Fascinating!

It inspired me to create a survey to see how well the MGoCommunity could predict this season's outcome. For each game, I'm asking you to assign a probability of winning. I will then average out the win % for each game and run a Monte Carlo simulation to arrive at a predicted number of wins for the season. After the season is over, we can see how we did. A number of experts have made their predictions for our season (e.g. http://mgoblog.com/mgoboard/det-news-article-predicting-number-michigan-wins-season and http://mgoblog.com/mgoboard/angelique-s-chengelis-predicts-michigans-season) let's see if we can do better! 

My survey isn't testing the theory exactly. For one, we aren't guessing a single value. Rather, we are guessing a set of probabilities. If we predicted a 50% win probability for a game, were we right if we win or if we lose? Or, if we predict a 90% win probability and then lose that game, were we wrong? Not necessarily: play that same game another 9 times and maybe we win all 9. There are random chances inherent to football that interfere with the theory above. Also, our pool of respondents is inherently biased. Are we going to overpredict the number of wins?

This season will be especially interesting given how difficult it is to quantify HARBAUGH and how much the disappointment of the last few years will skew us towards pessimism, but I plan to do this every season going forward. I suspect it will be a fun tradition.

I'll leave the survey open up until kickoff of the Utah game and will post the results a few days later.

TL;DR

Let's see how accurately the MGoCommunity can predict the outcome of the season by assigning a win probability to each game. I'll run a simulation with the results to calculate the number of wins we as a community expect. Here is the link to the survey: https://www.quicksurveys.com/s/Cj74PpK Thanks for participating!