Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Redskins Football Games Predict Election Winner

Posted by timothy on from the path-to-power dept.

jangobongo writes "The folks that investigate urban legends at Snopes.com have looked into the rumor going around on the internet that says, "The outcome of Washington Redskins football games has correctly predicted the winner of every U.S. presidential election since 1936." Their findings? It's true! The predictive game for this year will happen on October 31 vs. Green Bay. Which team are you gonna root for?"

1 of 91 comments (clear)

  1. Complexity by dtfinch · · Score: 5, Informative

    15 correct predictions: 1/2^15=1 in 32768
    Some ways to interpret:
    incumbent vs challenger
    republican vs democrat
    the inverse of each
    =4, making it 1 in 8192
    X big teams (I have no idea how many, not a sports fan). Lets say 64.
    So 1 in 128 of a big sports team randomly predicting 15 elections in a row correctly, or somewhat greater considering the average odds of winning (team or president) is not exactly 50-50.

    And there are easily a couple hundred other possible predictors that people could identify with.
    So lets say the odds were 0.99 in 1 of finding something like this.