NBA.com - April 17, 2009
The Playoffs are filled with talking heads. They're NBA veterans in nice suits, or hard-nosed reporters spending their lives in the locker rooms, all spewing opinions on who the next NBA champion migt be. Once in a while, they even turn out to be right. What if there were some guys who were never in the league, though, and who never appeared on TV, and they turned out to be better analysts than your typical talking head? And what if they could kick your butt in a game of Jeopardy, too? Those guys are professors Joel Sokol, 37, Paul Kvam, 46, and George Nemhauser, 71, at the Georgia Institute of Technology's H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. Together, the professors have invented an equation called the Logistic Regression Markov Chain (LRMC) that can predict the outcome of sporting tournaments. Using this highly complex mathematical equation, they can pick the NBA champion for the 2008-09 season without watching a game.
http://www.nba.com/2009/playoffs2009/04/17/gatech20090417/