CLEVELAND — Drew Pasteur’s day job is a math professor at The College of Wooster, but his hobby is being a sports statistician.

He started the website Ohio Fantastic 50, where he keeps track of the scores of Ohio’s high school football games and even makes rankings and predictions.

“This was in the era of the college football BCS computer rankings," Pasteur said. "And so I started doing my own thing there.”

He’s coded the website to function on its own. One section simulates playoff games.

“If we play out the rest of the regular season, say, 10,000 times, how likely is a certain team to make the playoffs if they only lose one more game," Pasteur said. 

This year, he’s predicted correctly in at least 75% of the games each week.

Pasteur said for high school football, the main factors you need are margin of victory and strength of schedule

“High school games do have a lot more mismatches than at the college or pro level, so it’s easier to pick a high percentage there," Pasteur said, "but getting the margins of victory close is a little tougher.”

Pasteur said the start of the season is the hardest to predict because he doesn’t always know if a team’s success from last year will carry over. 

“Once you get down to the regional finals, which is the final eight and beyond, everybody’s very, very good," Pasteur said. "There are not a lot of mismatches left, and so those games are tough to pick.”

He said the website is a great way to get people to use their heads when analyzing sports, and it’s a great teaching tool to make math fun for his students, especially if they like sports.

“Sports provides accessible problems where’s there’s lots of data available, and so it’s a great place to learn things that then they can use in other places, and it’s a fun setting for them," he said.