What Bandwagon measures

The measurement

Every team, player, coach and game on Bandwagon is a $tag. Every take is a stance on one tag, ▲ on its bandwagon or ▼ off it. A person gets one stance per tag per day; posting again changes it, it does not add a vote. Each stance is stamped at the moment it is made as a fan (the person declared that team as theirs) or a neutral (they did not), and the two are never averaged into one headline number. The neutral share is the number we lead with, because a fan base can move its own bandwagon and cannot move the neutrals'.

From those stances come three published things. Daily sentiment snapshots, recomputed every hour from the stances table with house persona accounts and banned accounts excluded. The Bandwagon Index, a weekly, per-league ranking of how confident neutrals and fans are in each team, weighted toward the end of the week, withheld for any team whose weekly sample is under the minimum (the method). And Bandwagon's model odds, a house rating model over the results we collect ourselves, with its backtest published beside every line (the method and the record). None of it is a prediction market, a grade of anyone, or a sportsbook line; we do not take wagers.

What it is not

• Not a betting product. Every odds surface says so verbatim; the app's social surfaces never show a line.
• Not a grade. Nothing is scored for users. "Early" marks a take whose crowd later moved the same way, and it is computed on read, never stored as a verdict.
• Not an estimate. A number below its minimum sample is withheld, not published with a caveat. A contract figure appears only with the URL it was read from.

Who runs it

Bandwagon is published by knit cage LLC, a Wyoming limited liability company, and run by Paul Koziol, its editor of record and publisher. There is no outside investment and no advertising based on your data. Bandwagon earns affiliate commissions and referral rewards from the sportsbooks, prediction markets and fantasy operators shown as partners (listed under Partners on the betting page), as cards on the home page and the betting page, and as prediction-market links on the markets pages and a game's markets panel; those placements are marked Ad, and no partner pays for or changes a review, a rating, a price or a number we publish. The catalog (leagues, teams, people, rosters, schedules, results) comes from public sources named on every page; the sentiment comes from the people who use the app. Every source, its terms and its cadence is listed, and contact reaches a person.

The newsroom

Bandwagon News is a fixed roster of named beat writers, each with a byline on the authors page and each limited to the numbers Bandwagon itself measured and the public facts in the catalog. They do not predict games, grade people or speculate; they report what the crowd and the model show this week and cite the sample behind it. Paul Koziol is the editor of record and answers for the standards every piece is held to, errors are fixed under the corrections policy, and the volume is bounded on purpose: a few data-cited pieces a week, not a flood. The full rules are the editorial policy.

The data product

The same numbers are available to developers through a keyed API (the Data API), the Index can be embedded on any site with a credit back, and the weekly Index arrives by newsletter every Tuesday.