Possible Data Delays Due To Hurricane Fiona

September 23, 2022 - by David Hess

Hurricane

UPDATE (Monday, September 26 at 1:30 PM ET): The storm has mostly passed Halifax. There were no major data disruptions.

As of Friday, September 23 at 3:00 PM ET, Hurricane Fiona is forecast to make landfall in the North Atlantic region Friday evening. The storm will likely miss most U.S. sporting events. However our main data provider, Gracenote, is located in Halifax, Canada, which is directly in the path of the hurricane. They alerted us this afternoon that there is a high chance of delayed data updates this weekend (September 23-25), as the safety of their staff take top priority.

We expect these will be the main impacts to TeamRankings, BetIQ, and PoolGenius:

Power ratings calculated on September 24-26 may not include all games from the previous day.
Team and player stats calculated September 24-26 may not include all games from the previous day. In addition, they may incorrectly assume that a team or player had zero of a given stat, when in fact they just have missing data.
MLB game predictions on September 24-26 may be impacted, as the stats and power ratings they use as inputs may be affected.
Game results across the site may not be updated in a timely manner. For example, team game logs may not show the scores of games, betting pick pages may show games as “Started” but not graded, and prediction accuracy pages may not include all games.

We do not expect major disruptions to our Survivor and Pick’em tools, nor to our NFL or college football game predictions. These rely on stats and ratings that have already been calculated (and so won’t be impacted by any data delays) and on betting odds data that is collected via automated scripts and does not rely on human data entry by our data provider. The main thing you may notice is picks not being graded in a timely manner. But pick advice and predictions should not be affected.