Expected to lose: the biggest Elo upsets since 2006

How our client pulled off the biggest underdog victory of the last 20 years

In our last blog, we introduced our Elo model for rating team strength. In simple terms, Elo uses historical game results, accounting for both margin of victory and the strength of the opposition, to assign each team a rating. The higher the Elo rating, the stronger the team.

Because our dataset includes game scores dating back to 2006, we can calculate each team’s Elo rating before every game. By comparing the two ratings, we can then identify which victories represented the biggest statistical upsets.

The chart below shows the ten largest Elo upsets in our dataset. At the top of the list is our client Ohio University’s victory over Massachusetts last season - the biggest upset recorded since 2006.

Ohio scored the game’s only goal from a penalty corner in the 49th minute. To learn how our corner package can help your team analyze and improve its penalty corner performance, get in touch.