Sports intelligence · WNBA · Operational governance
How a WNBA model earns the right to run
Getting a model into a live workflow is an engineering achievement. Giving it authority is a separate governance decision. This public case study shows the evidence ladder between the two.
· Public operating-model edition.
Decision
Live shadow is observation, not authority.
The public-facing decision is deliberately unambiguous: the operational shadow/live workflow is not live-capital approval. Shadow operation lets the team test timeliness, stability, data quality and review processes against real arrivals while keeping exposure at zero.
Observe first
Let the system ingest, score and record the live-shaped stream without giving the output authority over money or customer decisions.
Compare through time
Evaluate the same event at season open, 24 hours, 12 hours, 6 hours, 2 hours and 30 minutes so late information cannot disguise weak earlier behaviour.
Promote explicitly
Every candidate has a named state. Blocked and research remain visible; shadow is monitored; live-capital approval stays at zero until evidence earns a separate decision.
Operating coverage
Scale tests the system around the model.
More than a million candidate observations exercise ingestion, market mapping, horizon alignment, persistence and review. That volume is evidence of operational coverage—not a count of transactions and not a performance result.
| Market family | Candidate observations | Public interpretation |
|---|---|---|
| Sportsbook moneyline | 390,010 | Largest observed family. |
| Sportsbook spread | 329,556 | Separate market and settlement shape. |
| Sportsbook game total | 329,474 | Separate target and monitoring surface. |
| Prediction-market moneyline | 5,393 | Smaller stream, reported rather than extrapolated. |
| Total | 1,054,433 | Candidate observations, not trades. |
Rolling holdouts
Make the past behave like the future
A rolling holdout trains on earlier information and tests on a later season. That preserves the direction of time and makes changes in league conditions visible. The public evaluation covers 249 holdout events in 2023, 262 in 2024 and 311 in 2025.
| Holdout season | Events | Decision snapshots |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 249 | Season open, 24h, 12h, 6h, 2h, 30m |
| 2024 | 262 | Season open, 24h, 12h, 6h, 2h, 30m |
| 2025 | 311 | Season open, 24h, 12h, 6h, 2h, 30m |
Governance ladder
Status is a control, not a slide label.
The portfolio state is intentionally mixed: 16 candidates are in shadow, 2 are under stability watch, 6 remain research-only and 12 are blocked. None has live-capital approval. That distribution is healthy when the system is learning; it would be a problem if every experiment were quietly treated as ready.
| State | Count | Authority |
|---|---|---|
| Shadow | 16 | Observed in live-shaped operation; no capital authority. |
| Stability watch | 2 | Additional monitoring required before any promotion decision. |
| Research | 6 | Offline investigation only. |
| Blocked | 12 | Explicitly prevented from promotion. |
| Live-capital approved | 0 | No candidate is authorised to control capital. |
Leadership takeaway
Build a path to “yes” that protects “not yet”.
- Separate technical liveness from decision authority. A daemon can be running while the model remains safely unapproved.
- Monitor the product at the time decisions happen. Six horizons expose whether quality is dependable early or only appears close to start time.
- Keep blocked work legible. A visible block is an organisational memory; silently deleting failures invites teams to repeat them.
- Promote a system, not a score. Data freshness, stability, settlement, review and incident handling matter alongside offline modelling.
Limits
What these aggregates cannot show.
Candidate volume demonstrates coverage, not independence or predictive quality. Holdout counts demonstrate evaluation scale, not current performance. Governance counts show the operating state at publication, not a promise of future promotion. No probability, return or suitability claim should be inferred from this page.