This week I posed a simple question to the students in the “Sports Analytics in Practice” course that I teach with Philip Maymin at New York University’s Stern School of Business: “Would you rather have two 50% chances to score, or five 20% chances?” It’s a question that teams in the English Premier League and other competitions might want to ask themselves, too, in light of Leicester City’s performance this season. If the question was simple, the answer was not – and there was no consensus in the class. Some students thought a team should be indifferent. Others argued that in a low-scoring…
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