Team Sustainability

How it works

Team Sustainability holds a team's win-loss record up against its own scoring margins. A team can be 15-5 while outscoring opponents like a 12-8 team — the standings say one thing, the play underneath says another, and the gap between them is measured in the only unit that matters: wins. "Their record is three wins ahead of what their scoring supports" is the whole finding.

The reason to care is what such gaps do next, and it is the best-replicated result among our team models: teams far ahead of their margins fall back, and teams far behind recover — in every season of every sport we tested. Football is where it bites hardest: a 4-1 team with the scoring margins of a 2-3 team is one of the most reliable fade signals in the data. But it is a lean about a tendency, not a schedule — the gap closes on average, and the wins already banked stay banked. A team three wins ahead of its margins is expected to win at its play's pace from here, not to hand three wins back.

This metric also carries the clearest example yet of our models shipping only what survives testing. The design called for a second layer — splitting the margins themselves into luck and skill, the way the analytics conventional wisdom does. We tested that wisdom, and it lost: a baseball team's record in close games and its batting luck both turned out to persist, meaning they are partly skill, and discounting them — the standard sabermetric move — would have been wrong in our data. The shooting-luck adjustment for basketball made predictions worse in every season tested. Both are out. What shipped is a third of the original design, and it is the third that is true.