This story appears in ESPN The Magazine's Feb. 27 Entertainment Issue. Subscribe today!

IS REALITY-TV dating a sport? Of course it is! It's competitive and strategic, and its battles reveal how its participants respond to challenges. It requires stamina. It has inspired fantasy leagues. And it's way more popular than the biathlon. While, uh, conducting research on this matter, I realized it's possible to apply the same kind of Giant Killer analytics we use to identify college hoops dark horses to The Bachelor: Using regression analysis, we can isolate the variables that have keyed past winners, then see which current contestants share those characteristics. After all, as Shushanna Mkrtychyan, the only Bachelor contestant ever with "mathematician" listed as her occupation, recently posted on Instagram: "Mathematics may not teach me how to add love or subtract hate, but it gave me every reason to believe that every problem has a solution."

It turns out that at least partial data about contestants is available online for 13 past seasons of The Bachelor (2004 and 2006-16), and we compiled it with a big assist from data analyst (and Bachelor fan) Alice Zhao. So what matters when it comes to finding love?

HAIR COLOR: The single worst attribute for a Bachelor contestant is red hair, which leads to women leaving the competition an average of nearly four weeks earlier than they would otherwise, according to our statistical model. A ginger hasn't even made it past Week 1 since 2012, and last year bachelor Ben Higgins bypassed the perfectly lovely redhead Laura Esselman for (among others) a contestant who introduced herself by giving him a dental exam and a pair of twins who spoke in unison.

RACE: The Bachelor has famously never had an African-American bachelor or winner, and it once went four years without even having a black contestant. It's often hard to tell which of the show's dramas are rooted in actual conflict and which are played up by the producers for entertainment or shock value. But however you interpret incidents like last season's contestants deriding Jubilee Sharpe as a "queen bee" and not a soccer mom, the numbers are stark: Before this season, 15 of 26, or 58 percent, of The Bachelor's African-American women were eliminated in their first or second week, according to data from Fusion.net. And our model estimates that being black costs contestants, on average, about 2.3 weeks on the show.

AGE: Bachelors like their contestants young (finalists have been 25.6 years old, on average, versus 26.3 for all other contestants) ...

HEIGHT: ... and short. The data here is limited, but women who are 5-foot-8 or taller go home an average of 1.4 weeks earlier than those who are 5-4 or under.

REGION: In the 13 seasons I studied, 19 percent of finalists (five of 26) were from the Pacific Northwest, even though just 5 percent of contestants hailed from Washington or Oregon -- a trend first ID'd by the site Fantasy4Reality, which performed a similar analysis in 2014. On the other hand, 52 women have come from the Northeast, and zero -- zero! -- have advanced to the finals. I always assumed that Dolores Farburg was wiped out in Week 1 of Season 5 because she had the most un-Bachelor-like name ever, but maybe it was her hometown of Phillipsburg, New Jersey.

OCCUPATION: Employment categories can get dicey with a show that has counted a cadaver tissue saleswoman, a WWE diva-in-training and a chicken enthusiast among its contestants. Plunging ahead nonetheless, our model indicates that women who work in service or hospitality jobs, such as hairstylists or bartenders, enjoy a 2.7-week advantage on The Bachelor. But that doesn't necessarily mean they'll snag the final rose: 42 percent of the show's winners have come from helping professions, such as teaching, or nonprofits. It's almost as though the men on The Bachelor are the type who'd date a salon coordinator who used to be Miss Rhode Island but end up with a labor and delivery nurse. Wait, that actually happened in 2005.

Add it all up and our model projects this season's winner to be -- hold on to your hat! -- Corinne Olympios, the contestant everyone loves to hate. Corinne is very young (24), very short (5-1) and very assertive. Heading into Week 7, Nick Viall either likes or hasn't seen through her conniving ways. And the other survivors aren't lighting up our statistical model -- unlike last season, when the winner, Lauren Bushnell, was a flight attendant from Oregon.

I have to point out, though, that the 36-year-old Nick has been on something like 146 previous incarnations of The Bachelor, all unsuccessfully. And if he and the producers want to break with formula rather than follow it, they truly now have their chance. Rachel Lindsay is a 31-year-old African-American attorney from Dallas, and her interactions with Nick have genuinely sparkled. As with Giant Killers, the basic numbers matter, but so do the matchups.