The most famous statistician in the U.S., Nate Silver, has jumped from the New York Times to ESPN. Silver is best known for his Times blog and for correctly predicting the last two presidential elections.
News of Silver’s move broke on Friday when anonymous ESPN sources told The Times that its FiveThirtyEight.com author was moving on to the sports empire owned by the Walt Disney Company. Silver and Disney did not comment on the news. Silver’s Twitter page hasn’t been updated since Friday, when he told his 570,000 followers that he just watched Sharknado.
According to USA Today, Silver will focus on sports with ESPN, but will also likely be contributing to ABC News. At ESPN, it’s likely that he’ll work with Keith Olbermann, who joined ESPN for a late night show on ESPN2. The network is looking to bring in more famous names, since Fox Sports is launching its own network next month.
Silver became a well-known figure after predicting that President Obama would win in 2008. In 2012, he always saw Obama as the frontrunner, even though other polls suggested that it would be a tight race between Obama and Mitt Romney. Silver, 34, correctly predicted the outcome of the election in all 50 states, even noting that Florida’s results would be incredibly close.
Now, Silver will get to put his number-crunching skills to work on sports, although you can bet that ABC News will still ask him to use his skills for 2016.
image: Wikimedia Commons
