Week-5 Picks

Last week was the best of the season, hitting 5 of 7 picks, including all 3 of our Big Plays. For the season we are up to 15-9-1 (62.5%). And, nice bit, we’ve been on the positive side of the ledger every week. Smaller slate this week so we’re being a little aggressive with our…

Week-4 Picks

Last week we were 3-2-1, pushing the NYJ-Miami game when it went to OT. The crazy Baltimore-New England game got us into winning territory at the end of the weekend. We’re now 10-7-1 (58.8%) for the year. Large slate this week, with picks on 7 of the 15 games (Pittsburgh and Indy have byes). “Big…

Week-3 Picks

Last week we were 4-3, splitting our Big Plays and hitting 3 of the 5 Other Plays. With two weeks of games in now we have an initial look at opponent strength, so the model’s at least covering all the bases. Remember we do not consider injuries unless we explicitly say so (and that’s quite rare).…

Week-1 Picks

This week is a sort of beta trial for us, as we’ve never before made picks based on anything other than same-year performance. However, back-testing says we can do this (about as well as our normal picks) so we’ll give it a whirl. Our usual caveats apply – we do not consider injuries or, in…

Priors

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…