TeamRankings on ESPN SportsCenter: Announcing “The Predictor”

September 23, 2011 - by David Hess

It’s been a big week here in TeamRankings headquarters! Yesterday on the noon Eastern SportsCenter, a project we’ve been working on for the last month and a half finally made its debut under the hot lights of the small screen.

As we all watched with anticipation, our new custom-built touchscreen app — dubbed “The Predictor” — was rolled out for the first time and placed under the command of gentle giant Marcellus Wiley. Here’s a screenshot, unfortunately the video is no longer available on the ESPN site:

The Predictor utilizes logic derived from our official Similar Games model, which we currently take advantage of to generate predictions for every single game across all 5 leagues that we cover. (Here’s a description of our Similar Games model, and here’s an example prediction of the Week 3 Green Bay-Chicago matchup.)

ESPN analysts can select a game, pick the stats they think will be most important, and then get a prediction tailored to their choices.

Keep watching ESPN SportsCenter throughout the football season to see “The Predictor” applied to the biggest games each week.

You Can Use It Too! (if you’re an Insider)

In addition to the touchscreen app featured on the show, we’ve created two online apps that are available to ESPN Insiders. These function in the exact same manner as the version you see on TV, except they’re optimized for your mouse, rather than a former NFL lineman’s presumably fat fingers.

(Click the images below to check out the tools on the ESPN Insider site.)

The NFL Predictor:

And, the College Football Predictor:

We’ve received some great feedback so far from ESPN, so we expect to see The Predictor used a lot going forward. Regardless, we’ve put a lot of work into these apps, and we want to make sure that after all those sleepless nights, they’re as close to perfect as possible. So we hope you’ll check them out, and send any feedback our way.