PCT was by far the biggest division this year, so it's pretty natural to see higher deviations from the predictions. As in PT, the biggest misses are for teams that surprised everyone, with both Los Pollos Hermanos and Duolingo exceeding all expectations by far and actually even promoting to PT!
The latter can't be said of Bralirwa - Stevens, but finishing 10th instead of fighting for relegation is a good achievement, too. Of the other teams, only Cedevita finished more than 5 spots better than expected.
On the other hand, we have a team that had a strong start in its MG adventure, but definitely underperforming this year in Assa Abloy. Still clear of any relegation danger, but surely not a satisfying season - given their lack of activity, let's hope it wasn't the last one...
A clearly worse than expected season as well, being in relegation danger until the very last day, for Voyagin - Bird. Minions ended up just ahead of them, performing below expectations as well, just like Lierse SK - Pizza Ullo PCTeam. All other teams were at most 5 spots off prediction.
While we have two surprising promoting teams, all of the relegating ones were expected to be in the danger zone, so no surprises there.
Fun fact: The other three promoting teams were predicted exactly on the correct spot - which was the case for no single other team in the division.
Overall, the community predictions deviates from the actual outcome by 4.5 spots on average - given that we had 6 teams more than in PT, that's still an OK result. However, two individual predictions turned out to be slightly better, with redordead's 2021 PCT prediction diverging by 4.3 spots, and AbhishekLFC's Roundtable Analysis contribution by 4.4. And again as a part of the Rountable Analysis, knockout's prediction exactly matches the community one in terms of average rank difference.
Three of the remaining predictions were between 4.6 and 5.0 spots off, while the two final ones had an average deviation of more than 7.5 places. But at least we had a solid base of predictions with a total of 8 - by far the highest number of any division.
As expected, the smallest division had the most accurate preview. The biggest "outliers" in this prediction are Glanbia Foods Cycling Project finishing 3 spots higher than anticipated, while Pas Normal Studios - Mikkeller ended up 3 spots lower than expected.
The latter also were the only team the community prediction got wrong in terms of promotion; while 4 teams were correctly predicted to end up in the Top 5, the final promoting spot was taken by Crabbe-CC Chevigny. But we all know that if the game continues with 3 divisions, we'll likely have some additional promoting teams anyway...
The community prediction correctly estimated the final ranks of two teams - just like the two individual predictions making up the "community" one.
However, the average of the two turned out to be more accurate than the individual ones, with the community prediction deviating by just 1.4 spots from reality, while both knockout's and Ulrich Ulriksen's predictions in this thread were 1.6 spots off. Thanks to both of you for participating, and let's hope for some more contributions next time!
However, I'm not sure if I'll redo a community prediction for 2022. I'll probably do it for PCT, as there's often quite some "material" out there, but for the other two divisions the resources to base a community preview on were really scarce (3 and 2 for PT and CT).
Thanks for reading anyway, and thanks to all of you who somehow contributed to this one!
Thanks for the wrap. Even with the smaller division there must be something that makes CT easier as there were no major misses in either prediction. Maybe race planning is a smaller factor in the outcome.
Thanks for this! Always nice to see how you stack up against the other predictions.
Ulrich Ulriksen wrote:
Thanks for the wrap. Even with the smaller division there must be something that makes CT easier as there were no major misses in either prediction. Maybe race planning is a smaller factor in the outcome.
Id definitely say that the difference between team strengths is far bigger in CT. If you remove the top rider from any promoting pct team you have a bang average pct team or maybe even a team thats scared of relegation while in ct, you can sometimes remove top two riders and still have a team thats looking good for promotion. Same at the bottom of the ranking where an additional top 10 scorer in the division could turn every relegated pct team into something resembling a promotion contender while in ct it might not even push some into the mid table.
Its definitely something that was notable before the season when doing the previews. Almost all teams in pct (and also pt outside the bottom 1 and the top 4 or 5) had somewhat reasonable paths to either dramatically outperforming/underperforming the prediction while in ct, most teams i was fairly sure to have more or less nailed many predictions even when spending way less time looking at the teams. The quality difference are just visible like that.
