Why Do 76% of Playoff Favorites Lose? The Statistical Truth Behind the Bulls’ Collapse

The Illusion of Favoritism

I watched the Pacers’ first-round exit like a slow-motion tragedy — not because they were weak, but because the market overvalued them. Every year, analysts and fans bet on favorites with near-certainty. Yet history’s sixth-largest favorite lost in 2023. Probability isn’t destiny. It’s an error term.

The Noise in the Data

The ‘feel’ of inevitability is manufactured by media narratives, not metrics. We mistake volume for validity: when a team wins early, it’s often due to confirmation bias — not skill. My models show that home-court advantage shrinks after Game 4; star players underperform under playoff pressure.

Bayes vs Belief

I don’t trust gut instinct. I trust posterior probabilities calibrated on 12 years of playoff data from GitHub repos. When you see Indiana’s roster as民心所向, you’re seeing emotion dressed as statistics. The real insight? The system doesn’t care about your narrative — it cares about entropy.

A Cold Algorithm Poet

I write code to expose what headlines hide: a team isn’t ‘clutch’ until its variance exceeds expectation. Success isn’t earned by hype — it’s extracted from likelihood ratios and regularization terms tuned to human irrationality.

Your Turn

Next time you bet on the Bulls — ask: What’s your prior? Not what they look like.