Our picks last week went 2-4 overall. Both of our “Big Plays” lost, while we split the “Other Plays”. Despite the outcomes being unprofitable, I think we “won” with the process. The short-run driver of results in this business is luck; in the long-run, skill shines through. In the short-run, a better predictor of future…
Last week, we went 3-3 on our plays (all “Other Plays”). This has been a year with two big outliers. The Jaguars offense has been historically inept. The numbers are staggeringly awful. Jacksonville’s play success rate is only 24.8% (league average is 44.6%) and they average only 3.3 adj yards per play. The Jaguars don’t just…
Last week saw our NFL plays go 2-1-1, with Baltimore and Indy both covering comfortable (and winning outright), but San Diego could not seal the deal in the last minute and let Tennessee get the backdoor push. It’s very early in the year to say this, but our ratings certainly show that there is a…
Nice to be back in the win column! Excellent week last week, going 1-0 on Big Plays and 6-1 on Other Plays. There’s obviously some positive variance in there, but I’ll take it; we had more than our share of negative variance the week before. Once again on primarily underdogs this week. In my opinion,…
Every year, there are a few unexpected performances in the first week of the season, and this year was no different. Who expected the Eagles to walk all over the Redskins? Or the lowly Raiders to nearly beat the Colts? While there is plenty of signal in one week of data, its value is still…
After an offseason of tirelessly working on improving our already-successful model, we’re ready to unveil our picks for Week 1. Improvements include adjusting for nonlinearities in yards gained per play, doing a better job of distinguishing luck from skill in turnovers, and using a more sophisticated (and Bayesian!) method of adjusting for opponent. The other…
5-0 last week! Our first undefeated weekend. Been waiting for that one. They’re tough to get, of course, but there’s so much chance involved that if you pick long enough the odds favor eventually getting one. We enjoyed it. Pushes our YTD up to 25-22-3 (53.2%). We were 4-1 in the WSJ (dropping a winning…
1-2 last week, missing getting back into the black by a Dez Bryant finger or two. We’re now 20-22-3 YTD (47.6%). We were 1-1 in the WSJ, making us 9-12-1 YTD there (42.8%). As always, our lines are calculated directly from our power rankings – we don’t consider injuries, weather, matchups, etc. Lines are from…
We had our first losing weekend last week, going 2-3. Overall for the season we are 17-12-1 (58.6%). In the Wall Street Journal we actually went 3-1, pushing our yearly record to 7-4 (63.6%). As detailed in a blog entry last week, we’re tracking those picks separately since they are based on late-week lines. For…
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…