France vs Spain: The Two Meanest Defenses Left

After a day off yesterday (hey, there wasn’t much on) we’re back today with a World Cup gem: France vs Spain.

Also in this issue:

1. France vs Spain
2. The MLB season simulator, now live
3. A review of UFC 329
4. What’s next after the World Cup

World Cup: France vs Spain

Kickoff is at 3PM ET for these two giants of Europe. We’ve consistently had France making it to the finals of this tournament in our projections, and they’re on the cusp of doing so today.

At the time of writing, the official odds make it about a 60/40 split in France’s favor. We haven’t really seen the team struggle yet, except during the Paraguay game where they struggled to break through against the consistent high pressure reckless game Paraguay were playing.

So what’s the data say? France are 6 wins in the 6 games they’ve played scoring 16 goals and conceding just 2. From a pure xG standpoint the team has created 13.8 and conceded 3.3. So far, zero goals conceded in the knockout rounds.

Spain hasn’t looked so bad either. They had a 0-0 draw against Cape Verde, but since then have been on a good run with what is arguably the most difficult path faced by any semi finalist (Austria, Portugal, Belgium). The team has conceded just one goal in the tournament against Belgium in their last game and has scored 7 themselves.

The headline: these are the two meanest defenses left. Spain has conceded once, France twice. That's why the model screams low-scoring.

How it stands though, and there will be a final run so make sure to checkout the World Cup page, but our model, all the AI personas, and the 7 different LLMs we’ve asked are on France.

Our New MLB Sim

Just like the World Cup simulator, we’ve gone ahead and released our MLB simulator. This thing runs 10,000 seasons and you can see the output on the MLB simulator page.

The simulator runs daily with the latest results and we’ll keep track of movements so you can see how a win or loss shifts teams up and down as the season continues to play out.

For now, the Dodgers are the most likely team to win out the season with a 100% chance of making the playoffs (they get there in all 10,000 sims) and a 25% chance of winning the World Series. The most likely team they’ll face in the WS is the Yankees who have a 12% chance of winning the whole thing.

By comparison, the Dodgers sit around a 33% chance today on betting markets, while the Yankees sit right around 12%. Notice our model actually gives the Dodgers less than the market does, 25% against 33%. It's taking that probability and spreading it across the rest of the field, giving more credit to the pack of contenders behind the favorites than the betting markets are willing to.

We’ll write more about this in the coming days.

UFC 329

UFC 329 was a phenomenal card... until it wasn’t. The main card leading up to the McGregor vs Holloway fight was full of incredible matchups, and we tracked every one of them for the first time with the Predicted Sports AI Prediction Index.

Overall, the AI models did a fantastic job. In terms of record, Claude Sonnet 5 and Gemini 3.5 Flash came out on top with a 13-1. That was the best raw record of the night, but Claude Opus 4.8 was the sharpest calibrated with a solid brier score of just 0.206, so it wins the night on our scoring. On method prediction, Claude Sonnet 5 nailed 11 out of the 14 methods.

Raw accuracy, perfect prediction, 10 out of the 14 fights. A $100 bet at the closing line on fight & method would have returned a whopping $1210. I can tell you with certainty we’ll be tracking this closely going into this weekend’s event.

We already have this weekend’s first AI predictions up on the UFC Fight Night: Du Plessis vs. Usman fight card page now if you want to check them out.

After the World Cup

No doubt a lot of the readers (you) found this website in thanks to the World Cup models that were shared. Well, we’re not done.

NFL will take center stage in the coming weeks along with the Premier League. We’ll have simulations of the seasons that will persistently update alongside AI predictions and our own models.

Premium users: you’ll get access to our NFL Fantasy drafting tools and player props information. You’ll also get Survivor picks along with lineup optimizers for NFL, NBA, and soon MLB. Fantasy Premier League tooling is also coming along with the most awesome data sets and explore functionality around for all of these sports.

We’d love to have you along for the ride so sign up for a free 7-day trial now to check it out.