2017 was the 2nd year of existence for The Wizard. During the inaugural 2016 season, The Wizard of Oddz predicted only Mid-Penn Colonial Division football games. During that first year The Wizard's record was 48-8 in correctly selecting the winner of each game. That means in games where The Wizard had a team as the favorite for that game, 48 out of 56 times that team won or 85.7% of the time.

However, as previously mentioned during last year's recap, that only tells half the story. The Wizard provides precise percentile predictions for each game. And for that type of prediction there is a specific statistic called a Brier Score that tells you how accurately someone is at predicting these yes or no (win or loss) type scenarios. A score of 0 basically says that you are perfect at predicting these events (you are really good) and a score of 1 says that you never predict events correctly (you are really bad). You would get a score of 0.25 if you weighted every event as 50/50 (you are no better than flipping a coin). In 2016, The Wizard's Briar Score was 0.129 - compared to Cortana & FiverThirtyEight sports of ~0.23 for the 2015 NFL season.

That means The Wizard performs at a significantly high rate when predicting games for the Mid-Penn Colonial Division.

However, in 2017, The Wizard took the next step in its evolution by taking on the full Mid-Penn Conference. Rather than having 56 games to predict, The Wizard had over 300 games to predict. Overall, The Wizard was 251 - 64 or 81.3% correct, with a Briar score of 0.149. While both numbers are decreases from the prior year, these are still very impressive numbers given the increased population that is being examined.

In 2017, it was actually the Colonial Divsion that brought down the prediction record of The Wizard as there was significant parity in the division. Below is a Division by Division breakout of The Wizard's predictions -

Colonial Division- Record: 50-21, Briar Score: 0.186

Capital Division - Record: 76-15, Briar Score: 0.138

Commonwealth Division - Record: 67-13, Briar Score: 0.119

Keystone Division - Record: 58-15, Briar Score: 0.154

In addition here are the Top 5 Best & Worst individual team predictions by The Wizard -

Best Performances

Palmyra - 10 - 0

Boiling Springs - 10 - 0

Chambersburg - 10 - 0

Middletown - 14 - 1

Bishop McDevitt - 12 - 1

Worst Performances

Big Spring - 6 - 4

West Perry - 6 - 4

Milton Hershey - 6 - 4

Mechanicsburg - 6 - 4

Hershey - 6 - 4

As you can see, where The Wizard was good, he was really good and even where he wasn't feeling it, he was better than a coin flip. The Wizard hopes you enjoyed the 2017 season and this recap was better late than never.

The Wizard plans on continuing to up his game in providing you - The Mid-Penn football fan with more of what you want for the upcoming season. While more teams will not be added in 2018, The Wizard is hoping to provide more value to you regarding the Mid-Penn Conference and the football season ahead!

Thanks for being part of this journey!