This fall, the Westgate Las Vegas Hotel Casino is hosting the prestigious SuperContest, in which entrants pony up $1500 to pick 5 games a week against the spread. At season’s end, standings are judged by which entrants have the highest number of correctly picked games.

Last year’s winner was David Frohardt-Lane, who took home about $550k for first place. Perhaps not surprisingly, Frohardt-Lane is a statistician!

One of the neat aspects about the SuperContest is that the picks of all 1,403 of the 2014 entrants are posted immediately after the games begin (here). Even better, the data is fairly clean and easy to play with (at least so far).

That said, there are some very intriguing and potentially difficult questions to answer from a statistical perspective: How to account for the fact that people only pick 5 games per week? What about bye weeks? Do entrants pick each week seemingly…