Sports Analytics Students Predict Super Bowl LX Outcome

The Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots will meet in Super Bowl LX on Sunday, Feb. 8. The Super Bowl is consistently the most-watched television program in America, and millions of fans have a vested interest in who will win. Students in John Tobias’ Intro to Sports Analytics class used data-backed insights to answer that question.

“The assignment was open ended to a certain extent,” Tobias said. “You want to look for trends or precipitous drops between the regular season and the playoffs, and that’s what the students were able to uncover.”

Of the 20 groups that presented, 19 picked the Seahawks to win. Students pointed to Seattle’s upward trend in points per game, passing efficiency and positive turnover differential. The group that predicted a Patriots win cited New England’s undefeated road record as an advantage for the Super Bowl, which will be played in San Francisco.

Mason Cooper, a senior data science major, led one of the groups that chose the Seahawks. His team pulled advanced statistics to quantify the strength of Seattle’s defense — a hurdle he believes is too great for Patriots quarterback Drake Maye to overcome.

“It was cool to work with everybody to pull numbers and look historically at what metrics have contributed most to Super Bowl winners,” Cooper said.

Akhi Chappidi, a senior computer science major, bioinformatics concentration, is completing a sports analytics certificate. He predicts a 31–17 Seahawks win — and went above and beyond to back up that claim.

Chappidi built a model that processed data from the 2020 through 2025 NFL seasons in five key areas: time of possession, turnovers, red-zone conversion percentage, third-down conversion percentage and big plays. The model found that the Seahawks outperformed the Patriots in three of the five categories.

For Chappidi, an avid football watcher, it was gratifying to apply his computer science knowledge to the game.

“This assignment was incredibly fun and allowed me to view the Super Bowl through my lens, which is data and AI, and create a data-driven output to determine the outcome,” Chappidi said.