Quoted by Bergen Record on the NY Giants' 2011 Season

"Who Will Win the Big Game?" co-author, Dr. Jay Granat, was recently quoted by the Bergen Record:

The nightmares still haunt the Giants, hiding just beneath the surface.

AP

In Tom Coughlin’s eight seasons, the Giants are 47-17 in the first half. They are just 24-32 in the second.

The Second-Half Collapse of 2008. And 2009. And 2010.

They’re still very much with the team.

“You just try not to think about it,” linebacker Michael Boley said. “The last couple of years we’ve been known to collapse toward the end of the year.”

The Giants are off to another strong start, just as they were in 2008. And 2009. And 2010.

But no matter how big Sunday’s victory over the Patriots was, and no matter how rosy things appear at 6-2 with a two-game lead in the NFC East, the specter of another second-half fade will hang over them until they exorcise those demons.

In Tom Coughlin’s eight seasons, the Giants are 47-17 in the first half. They are just 24-32 in the second.

Jay P. Granat, a River Edge-based sports psychologist and founder of StayInTheZone.com, said the Giants have two tremendous advantages they did not have in previous seasons...


Read more here:
http://www.northjersey.com/sports/pro_sports/football/Giants_hoping_to_avoid_another_second-half_meltdown.html


Dr. Jay Granat, a psychotherapist and sports psychologist, is co-author of "Who Will Win the Big Game?  A Psychological & Mathematical Approach" with Carlton Chin, CFA, an MIT-trained "quant" and fund manager.  Granat is founder of StayInTheZone.com and Chin is chief investment officer of CARAT / Adamah Capital.  

Quant Facts: 25-15

Our "quant fact" predictions dropped to 25-15, with the Texas Rangers failing to close out the World Series (by yielding leads two times) in Game Six.  Congratulations to both teams on a great season and an exciting World Series.

Several people have commented about our analysis and lamented about the lack of hard-core, deep, analysis.  While we perform very serious research in other sports and financial work, our analysis for our book, "Who Will Win the Big Game?" -- and series of blog posts and articles -- is fairly simple, and is meant to demonstrate the power of sports analytics applied to concepts of sports psychology.  Our methods focus on statistics that relate to championship characteristics such as consistency, leadership, experience, and minimizing errors.

While we have developed game simulators that can predict, with more precision, the probabilities of certain events occurring in major sports such as baseball and football -- our more "simple"methods come up with interesting angles and sometimes pick underdogs.

If we want a more complex analysis, we can use our game simulators.  Or, we can apply all kinds of modern-day sabermetric-type analysis and try to come up with an edge.  But will it really be an edge?

If we use these methods and attempt to use them at sports books in Nevada, we do not believe there will be much of an edge over the casinos.  After all, that's their job: they are oddsmakers and the odds they put out are fairly "sharp" -- especially when factoring in how the oddsmakers will "balance" their book of business.

If we use complex analysis -- we will probably come up with similar results of the sports books.  This, then, yields no edge, as we will have to pay for the more expensive odds that the favorite would require.  On the other hand, our methods sometimes pick underdogs (such as New Orleans over the Colts in Super Bowl XLIV [winner], or Flyers in 2010 Stanley Cup Playoffs [loser], and March Madness -- where we have been particularly successful).

In my work with Dr. Jay Granat, we use fairly simple methods to quantify concepts of sports psychology.  While some of these methods seem "simple," they demonstrate the power of sports analytics and sports psychology.  We believe that this approach can uncover edges in sports.