Wednesday, June 17, 2015

NFL update....

Can't forget about the number one moneymaker in the country now, can we? Here's an interesting piece from Fansided detailing what (they think) it will take for each of the 32 NFL teams to make the playoffs this coming 2015 season. For some, not such a chore (New England: show up); for others, it's a bit tougher (Jacksonville: pray for Bortles' deification).

We will hold off on making any NFL predictions until at least August, but we're planning on leading the way with our prognostications again this fall with input on several fronts: 
--- Both Sagarin and 538's ELO rating systems are available to us this season from day one.
--- We'll be starting as we always do: no 1st, 2nd, 3rd place stuff until we're far enough into the season to have a decent and trustworthy representation. This has given us an advantage in the past: no pre-season ranking "inertia" to overcome! What you'll get after week one from us will be (at most!) dividing the teams into three tiers (it might just be two), with the eventual goal of splitting into the eight that we finish the year with, at which point we can start dividing those down further as the teams begin to separate more. (The same will be true with college football, on a larger scale of course!)
--- Last year, our predictions were far ahead of Vegas' record for accuracy! In NFL games in particular, we went 10-2, 6-7-1, and 10-3 in our last three weeks of the season, and managed to "outsmart" the Vegas odds more often than not in all but one week of the last half of the season (when we started keeping tabs on these things)! Similar results occurred in the college ranks, for that matter, and we won the Bowl Games Prognostication Showdown last winter, outperforming the Vegas oddsmakers, ESPN's experts, and the Sagarin computers in predicting the winners of the 39 bowl games (we went 23-16, three to five games ahead of the competition!)
--- And if cross-sport expertise is applicable...we're sitting in the top 1% of tipsters in the Australian Rules Football prediction game (out of 175.000 members!). 

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