The Good and the Bad

As usually seems to be the case with this kind of thing, there was good news and bad news this NFL weekend.  On the bad news side, my fantasy teams continue to be horrible and the Lions lost a winnable home game.  On the good news side, the models finally seemed to have a decent week.  Let’s see how it went.

As usual, I’ll get the over/under out of the way first.  We had one push, with Tampa and Washington hitting 46 right on the nose.  Luigi was 6-8-1, Yoshi 1 only 4-10-1, and Yoshi 2 7-7-1.  That means for the season Luigi is 19-26-2, Yoshi 1 is 20-25-2, and Yoshi 2 is 20-25-2.

I am also not doing so hot in my pick ’em league.  I’ve been using Luigi’s estimates for the most part, and this week he went 9-6.  Yoshi 1 was 8-7, and Yoshi 2 was 7-8.  That puts them at overall records of 21-26, 25-22, and 22-25.  Putting the moneyline into play, Luigi was 4-8 (Carolina or New Orleans coming through would have swung things the other way, and Miami was a close call too), Yoshi 1 was 5-10, and Yoshi 2 was 4-10.  That puts the models at overall records of 12-30, 20-26, and 15-28.  The Yoshis are still in the black overall.

So those results don’t sound so hot, but I always look forward to the spread the most and that went fairly well.  In all games Luigi was only 7-8 but there were a lot of close calls in his picks; in the games he had a stronger opinion about (i.e. those where his estimate was more than a point away from the spread) Luigi was 6-3.  Yoshi 1 was 4-11 and 5-7, while Yoshi 2 was 7-8 and 7-4.  So only Yoshi 1 had a poor week.  Overall Luigi has an all-game record of 19-25-3, Yoshi 1 is 24-20-3, and Yoshi 2 is 20-24-3.  Over the past couple years Luigi has an all-game rate of about 53%, so presumably his numbers at least will come up a bit.  More importantly, the ‘pickable’ records are 16-18-3, 22-15-2, and 17-18-3.  I expect that to pick up a bit as well.

While we’re talking about the spread and eliminating some games, I can cover the Hilton SuperContest real quick.  You make your five most confident picks and get a point for being right and half a point for a push.  The last two years Luigi has done pretty well in this subset of games.  I forgot to put the picks in my post, but Luigi would have taken the Jets +4 (lost), New Orleans +7.5 (won), Giants +2.5 (won), Chicago +3.5 (won), and Buffalo +4 (lost) for a record of 3-2 and an overall record of 7-6-2 and (adding my separate week 1 points) 11 points.  Yoshi 1 would have taken the Jets (lost), Buffalo (lost), Jacksonville +2.5 (lost), Kansas City +1 (lost), and Cleveland +12 (won) for a record of 1-4 and overall scores of 7-7-1 and 10 points.  Yoshi 2 would have taken the Jets (lost), New Orleans (won), Giants (won), Buffalo (lost), and Chicago (won) to go 3-2 for an overall record of 8-5-2 and 12 points.

Finally we have the picks against Bill Simmons.  Bill went 8-7 for an overall record of 25-20-2.  Luigi went 8-7 as well for an overall record of 20-25-2.  Yoshi 1 was 7-8 to make it up to 25-20-2, and Yoshi 2 went 8-7 for an overall record of 20-25-2.  So pretty much the same outcomes for everyone this week, even making some different picks.  Bill stays out ahead of Luigi and Yoshi 2 but is tied with Yoshi 1.

As a side note, I thought I would check on what happens when all three models agree.  Maybe if they all come to the same conclusion, there’s a better chance that will happen.  It doesn’t seem to help the over/under or the moneyline bets (presumably because at least one of the models is not so hot at those so far), but they agreed on 26 spread picks.  They actually agreed to avoid 3 of those, leaving 23 ‘pickable’ games, and the models are 12-9-2 in those games.  Not great, but not bad either.  I’ll keep an eye on the ‘consensus’ picks to see if they stay ahead of the individual models, as is true so far for Luigi and Yoshi 2 at least.