Professor Drew Pasteur featured on Fox 8 News combining passions for mathematics, football

Drew Pasteur, professor of mathematics at The College of Wooster, has found a way to use his expertise to explore another passion of his – high school football.

Pasteur was featured on an Aug. 25 broadcast of Fox 8 News in Cleveland for his website, Ohio Fantastic 50, that predicts the outcomes of high school football games in Ohio and ranks the teams across the state.

Pasteur, who also serves as a faculty athletic representative for Wooster’s athletic department, gathers scores and information from multiple sources and applies statistical analysis to generate his rankings and make weekly predictions. The website will also project which teams will make the state playoffs later in the season.

His analysis weights the previous season’s results heavily earlier in the season, then as more data during the current season is added, the weights shift more to the recent information. By mid-season, Pasteur’s predictions are correct more than 85 percent of the time.

Pasteur, co-chair of Mathematics and Computer Science at the College, told Fox 8 that these types of applications are useful across industries and show the importance of mathematics and data analysis.

“The skills that we’re talking about with football and basketball are the same ones that might be used to look at data medicine and health care or analyze a company’s sales performance and sports. It’s a fun way for students to learn some of those skills,” Pasteur said to Fox 8 in an interview that took place on Wooster’s campus.

Posted in Faculty, News on August 29, 2022.