Now that the injury situation is clear we can make a final call on tonight’s game. Not that it’s easy to do. We make adjustments for QBs but there is considerable uncertainty, especially with QBs starting for their teams for the first time. Fortunately we have the Niners ranked much higher than the Bears, in…
We’ll have our rankings up shortly but wanted to first post a short note about the QB injuries this week. We’re adjusting the rankings to reflect that Vick and Roethlisberger will be out and that Smith and Cutler are questionable. Given the uncertainty, the Niners’ and Bears’ rankings are the average of their rankings with…
Beginning this week we are adding a couple of adjustments to our game predictions. Digging through historical performance we find that teams perform better in the week after a Thursday night game, and after a bye. In both cases, the effect is about 2 points. That is, teams coming off bye weeks or Thursday games…
Last week the Wall Street Journal debuted our 2012 picks in their national edition, and plan to run the picks on Fridays for the rest of the season. Those picks are based on Thursday afternoon lines, while the picks we blog are based on Tuesday afternoon lines. That means peformance can vary across the two. In…
For the first time since we started this work we’re going to use priors in our rankings. We were driven to this because we wanted to make week-1 predictions, but we’re also hopeful it will boost our performance early in the season. We are doing this in the most simple, light-handed, and in some ways obviously…