Ah, NFL season is finally here. Here at Massey-Peabody, we do what we always do and wait until July to implement all the great ideas we came up with to improve the model the previous season. While there haven’t been major changes to our regular model, we’ve been working on a way to quantify the impact of individual players in a supplemental model, but that’s still a work in progress so I’m not really ready to roll it out yet, plus I haven’t decided about making that information public.
For now, we’re going to keep going with our picks based strictly on the Massey-Peabody model and my own Bayesian home field advantage numbers for each team.
Our historical performance can be viewed here. Over 791 NFL and college football official picks, we’ve won at a 55.4% clip.
For years, we’ve categorized picks into “Big Plays” and “Other Plays”. A few years back we also added in break-even or better unofficial leans — games where we thought we had a minimal edge. I want to simplify things, and I’ve always hated those categorizations, so we’re going to change things up. We’ll have one category. Picks. That’s it. That will encompass every game we anticipate covering at a rate of 54% or higher (after regressing our line towards the market number). For those unfamiliar with the way we display our predictions, Philadelphia -0.3 vs. Atlanta means our mean predicted score difference is Philadelphia winning by 0.3 points.
Here’s what we got this week…
MP Week 1 Lines and Picks
- Philadelphia -0.3 vs. Atlanta
- note that this uses Foles at QB for PHI
- Pittsburgh -2.4 at Cleveland
- Minnesota -8.2 vs. San Francisco
- Indianapolis -0.6 vs. Cincinnati
- Baltimore -9.2 vs. Buffalo
- Jacksonville -2.5 at NY Giants
- New Orleans -10.0 vs. Tampa Bay
- note that this uses Fitzpatrick at QB for TB
- New England -8.1 vs. Houston
- Miami -2.3 vs. Tennessee
- Pick: Miami +1
- LA Chargers -5.9 vs. Kansas City
- Denver -0.2 vs. Seattle
- Pick: Seattle +3
- Carolina -1.92 vs. Dallas
- Washington -0.6 at Arizona
- Green Bay -5.9 vs. Chicago
- Pick: Chicago +7.5
- Detroit -2.8 vs. NY Jets
- Pick: NY Jets +6.5
- LA Rams -2.0 at Oakland
- Pick: Oakland +4