A true edge in sports comes from being able to predict outcomes. Knowing the outcomes of games, player performance, attendance data and every other small aspect of a professional sports franchise means less uncertainty. And, less uncertainty means knowledge that could make or break seasons. 

Professional teams have turned to almost every source of information under the sun to feed their piles of knowledge. Data analytics are at the core of almost every professional sports team, a direct consequence of wanting to remove uncertainty from the game. 

I would like to propose a different approach to this uncertainty. Wearables and health-tracking technology? That’s been done before. High-tech stadiums and crowd analytics? I’ve been to a Clippers game. Zodiac signs to predict team synergy? I’ve seen — and love — Zodiac GM’s posts on X already. 

A truly novel idea in this day and age is hard to come by. This is why team owners and betting gurus alike should be afraid — and in awe — of the power of the corgi.

The Corgi

Steph Furry, or @aircorg on Instagram, is a corgi with a following of more than 388,000 as of publication. The trickshot-making pup predicts the outcomes of NFL, MLB, NBA, WNBA and NHL games regularly, also foraying into the world of soccer with Champions League and Club World Cup predictions. 

So far, the corgi has made more than 1,100 posts of almost the same nature. Furry is presented with two hoops labelled with the teams he is predicting for. Somebody, presumably his owner, throws the ball to Furry, and he nudges the ball into whichever hoop he vibes with at the moment. 

Over the course of his years-long tenure as a sports pundit, the corgi has made incredible predictions, including the Pacers’ upset win over the Cavaliers in the 2025 Eastern Conference semifinals and the Oklahoma City Thunder’s dramatic triumph over the Denver Nuggets in the Western Conference semifinals, where he predicted that it would go to seven games. 

But, beyond his best videos, I wanted to see just how accurate the corgi really is using the power of data. 

I used data from the NFL, MLB and NBA collected in the last six months, which included postseason basketball, postseason baseball — up until the World Series, of course — and the first eight weeks of the NFL. There were more football games — 28 in total — than basketball, 15, and baseball games, 10. The relatively small dataset was due to the fact that I manually collected the corgi reels’ results, which included me getting quite familiar with an Excel spreadsheet.

The Results

The code really was quite simple once I collected the data: It compares the corgi’s predictions to actual winners, also separating based on the sport. I also mined the BetMGM favorites for each of the matchups in the dataset to see if Furry or Las Vegas was more skilled at predicting athletic results. 

You might be thinking: “Wouldn’t the corgi just be right 50% of the time? Isn’t it just a game of chance?”

If only it were so simple. I would like to point out the interesting bits about the corgi’s procedure. 

The corgi is not a completely random actor; as a living, breathing entity, he inherently adds his own desires in every swish of his head. Perhaps he truly favors the New York Yankees over the Toronto Blue Jays, or perhaps he just prefers the right hoop to the left. We will never know exactly what is going through his head. 

So now, onto the results. 

Overall, the corgi was correct around 53.78% of the time in the dataset I collected. Breaking it down sport-by-sport, the corgi was correct 60% of the time when it came to basketball — interesting, as his name is Steph Furry — and only 50% and 51.72% correct when it came to baseball and football, respectively. 

But, the plot thickens when you compare the corgi’s results to BetMGM’s favorites. Overall, BetMGM was only correct 51.85% of the time, almost 2% less correct than the corgi. 

BetMGM was more accurate when it came to baseball, at 70%, similar for basketball at 60% and much less accurate for football at 41.38%. Now, I am not saying that BetMGM’s takes are completely invalid, but maybe think twice and check @aircorg before you decide to place that parlay. 

The corgi most often misclassified the Blue Jays, Kansas City Chiefs, San Francisco 49ers, Oklahoma City Thunder and Philadelphia Eagles — all teams that were favored in their dataset matchups. The corgi was most overconfident in the Los Angeles Rams and the Chiefs. 

These teams demonstrate that Steph Furry does not often pick the underdog against behemoth teams. In the case of the Chiefs and the Thunder specifically, Furry almost always picked them in their matchups. 

Something to remember: My dataset was pretty small, as it just included three of the corgi’s many different sports interests over a relatively short time period. Second, the corgi is not that much more accurate than BetMGM. 

But, in a game where every margin matters, maybe think about trusting Steph Furry. That corgi knows ball.

See my code here and my full dataset here.

Avani Lakkireddy is a sophomore using data analytics to find patterns and model behavior in college and professional sports in her column “The Data Made Me Do It.”