By Alan Coleman on 20 Sep 2013
Here's the table of how I worked out our prediction for the All-Ireland Football Final. 
The first thing I did was find out how many goals and points each team had scored and conceded over the course of this year's championship. I then got the average, per game, value for each team. This seemed like the obvious starting point and gave a taste of each team's strengths. However, I wanted these figures to be as objective as possible and decided it wouldn't be fair to use these numbers blindly as the basis for our prediction. I wanted to consider the relative strength of the opponents which each team had faced, to give the scoring statistics a bit more context. So my next step was to work out the average goals and points scored and conceded over the course of the championship by each of their past opponents. I worked out the average for the beaten opponents both before they played the finalists, and after (e.g. Mayo's opponents scored an average of 12.4 points per game in the games before they played Mayo, but if the games against Mayo are also taken into account, this average drops to exactly 12 points per match). I used this context to work out a coefficient value for goals scored, goals conceded, points scored and points conceded for each team. This coefficient was essentially the average multiple of the opponents' average score that Mayo managed to achieve in their matches this season (i.e. Mayo have scored, on average, 2.8 goals per game which is 2.92 times more than the average which their opponents had conceded this year, which was 0.96). I then used these coefficients to find a prediction for how many points and goals each team would score. For example, to predict how many goals Mayo would score, I multiplied their goals scored coefficient by Dublin's average number of goals conceded, then multiplied Dublin's goals conceded coefficient by Mayo's average number of goals scored, and then took the average of these 2 values. This value was 2.15, so I rounded to the nearest whole number, and predicted that Mayo are going to score 2 goals. I did the same for Mayo's points and Dublin's goals and points. To my horror, the scoreline I was left with was Mayo 2-13 Dublin 1-15. I hope I'm wrong.
Up the Dubs!
