Predictions

Oh. Did I mention I’m teaching two journalism classes this semester? Perhaps I did. Can’t remember. Working on a foggy 2-hours sleep after watching the election mayhem of last night (why couldn’t I have fallen asleep?). Anyway! This election has been quite a “teaching moment” for all of us in higher education. Journalism classes, especially, have relevance. Talking politics in any area is a tricky topic at best, so I tried to walk that narrow path in the middle (which, in this election, didn’t really exist). Being a Numbers Guy, though, the one bastion of neutrality that I could find (at least, in my opinion) was Nate Silver’s excellent analytics site called fivethirtyeight.com. What I like about that site is it’s mostly analytics and number crunching. Of course, politics has taken over the subject of late, but they do a lot with sports as well. Check it out.

So anyway! In my Tuesday night Sports Reporting class a few weeks ago, I noted fivethirtyeight.com and it’s percentage chance of the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series, after they had trailed the Cleveland Indians, 3 games to 1. That percentage chance, at that time, was hovering around 25 to 30 percent. Which, at that very moment, was identical to Donald Trump’s chances of winning the presidential election. And so, that night, as a Sports Guy, I posited that the Cubs were the best team in baseball throughout the regular season (103 wins!), their pitching was lined up, their lineup was ripe to start to bash the ball, and that by all means they were capable of coming back and winning the World Series. Definitely within the realm of possibility, which I then correlated to the presidential election, where most indicators were that Trump was a longshot at best, a landslide loser at worst. And so I went out on a limb that night and said, “Cubs come back and win the World Series; Trump comes back and wins the White House.” It should be noted that these outcomes were not necessarily my preference, but that I felt they were both very much in the realm of possibility – based on the analytics and based on pure gut feeling.

A member of my class texted me this morning, reminding me of my prediction, which of course I had long forgotten. Groggy from the all-night election coverage, I simply nodded my head and moved on with my day.