This is about the world of sportswriters, but it’s certainly easy to extrapolate the point to politics or games media. Dr. Z examines the official football picks of professional sportswriters and, surprise, they get it right slightly less than half the time. (link).

All you have to do is look at the papers. I like to check the handicappers’ boxes in the New York Daily News and Newark Star-Ledger, occasionally the Post. The News’ seven handicappers, whose selections go under the heading, Our Experts Call The Shots, are, collectively, 22 games below .500, or .478, this season. Only one of the seven is over the 50-50 mark, and don’t forget that a bettor has to pick 52.4 percent winners to break even, figuring in the 10 percent vigorish he has to fork over on every losing bet….The 10 football experts on the Post are, in toto, 46.2 percent winners.

Yep, the so-called experts in the field of football, people who devote their whole lives to observing the sport, are doing less than 50-50 in their picks. Two weeks ago, the esteemed Tuesday Morning Quarterback goes a step further, claiming that if you follow the rule of Home Team Wins, you’ll do better than 50-50, and far better than the experts as well. This week, he went a step further, predicting every Home Team to win, 20 to 17.

Last winter, yours truly tabulated the final score predictions offered over the years by the Sporting News, the New York Times and Scripps Howard News Service; of 2,426 predictions, five were correct. That represents one-in-500 odds of predicting an exact NFL final score. You might as well try to predict exactly on what day the next lunar landing will occur. But while it’s a waste of time to attempt to predict scores game by game, generic final scores make sense. In 2004, there were four NFL contests that ended Home Team 34, Visiting Team 31; four that ended Visiting Team 17, Home Team 10; three each that ended Home Team 24, Visiting Team 17, Home Team 20, Visiting Team 17 and Visiting Team 20, Home Team 17. So suppose last season you had simply endlessly forecast that every game would result in the home team winning by a count of 34-31. You would have been right four of 256 times — better than USA Today, which forecast games individually and went 0-for-256.

For the remainder of the NFL season, I’m forecasting every single game will end with the home team winning by a count of 20-17. That outcome happened three times last season, and has already happened twice this season…Sometimes on sports websites that are, let’s just say, not as good as NFL.com, you see touts predicting that games will end 33-19 or 15-12 or some other improbable combination; stick with likely scores. The second beauty of my system is that you don’t need to possess incredible insider information, you don’t have to pore over tables of statistics, you don’t even have to know which teams are playing!