The Prophets of Sports Illustrated

With my beloved Kansas Jayhawks in the Final Four for the first time since 2003, I'm paying a bit more attention to sports news over the past couple of weeks. On Friday, I found the Sports Illustrated college basketball experts' predictions for the weekend's three games. SI has five such experts, each of whom picked his winner for the Kansas-North Carolina and the UCLA-Memphis semifinals followed by their expert opinion on the winner of Monday's championship.
These geniuses, people who get paid good money for their college basketball acumen, made the following guesses. Four out of five of them picked North Carolina over Kansas. A different four out of the five picked UCLA over Memphis. All the picks for the final champion went to either UCLA or North Carolina. How rich.
On Saturday evening, Memphis thumped UCLA and Kansas spanked the Tarheels. Neither game was within single digits. Therefore, out of the possible ten right answers the SI experts posited, they got exactly two correct. To add to the beauty of this, they have no chance of adding right answers in the finals, since they all picked teams who have already lost! Thus, out of fifteen chances, they have gotten two right, considerably worse than coin toss guesses would have likely produced.
These sports-page prophets are just the latest and most trivial of the various prognosticators who you'll find showing up in magazines and other media. Do you remember the people who predicted with apparent certainty that the Bush administration would be reinstituting the draft or invading Iran over the last couple of years. You probably don't recall Richard Clarke's breathless 2005 article in which he predicted a nation wracked by continued terrorist attacks over the coming years. So far, Clarke's bleak vision appears quite fanciful. The same magazine featured a 1999 cover predicting "Dow 36,000." That came shortly before the dot-com bubble popped.
Of course all those brilliant financial minds at Bear Stearns and other lenders, who have gotten us into the whole subprime mortgage greed fest, were predicting the future as well. "It'll be okay," they assumed, glancing at their Harvard MBAs for reassurance.
What all of these stories should tell us is that hubris is alive and well in America. The best predictions today, as always, appear after the fact.
Without Harvard MBA's, government jobs, or SI press credentials, we're best off speaking of what is known and leaving the hard work of prophecy to the stronger minds.