College Football & Econometrics --> Fun with Matching

My friend Stephen Pettigrew, a PhD candidate in the Department of Government at Harvard, and I recently published a post on Deadspin’s Regressing blog.

The question we ask is how different college football teams have performed when featured in the national spotlight of ESPN’s College Gameday. To do so, we compare their outcomes in such games to otherwise comparable games. In other words, we ask do any of the teams regularly featured on Gameday suffer from a “Gameday curse” and do some of them even potentially benefit from a “Gameday bump”?

To answer this question, we use the statistical method of matching on observables. The results we derive are displayed in the graph below and the full writeup is available here.