There are three interesting sites doing the dirty job of forecasting playoff probabilities. The first is Cool Standings, which is using Pythagorean expectations to calculate the odds of successive wins and losses, and thus, the likelihood of a team making it to the playoffs. The second is a page on the Football Outsiders’s site named DVOA Playoff Odds Report, which is using their signature DVOA stat – a “success” stat – to generate the probability of a team making it to the playoffs. Then there is the site NFL Forecast, which has a page that predicts playoff winners using Brian Burke’s predictive model.
Of the three, Cool Standings is the most reliable in terms of updates. Whose model is actually most accurate is something any individual reader should try and take into consideration. Pythagoreans, in my opinion, are an underrated predictive stat. DVOA will tend to emphasize consistency and has large turnover penalties. BB’s metrics have tended to emphasize explosiveness, and now recently, running consistency, as determined by Brian’s version of the run success stat.
I’ve found these sites to be more reliable than local media (in particular Atlanta sports radio) in analyzing playoff possibilities. For a couple weeks now it’s been clear, for example, that Dallas pretty much has to win its division to have any playoff chances at all, while the Atlanta airwaves have been talking about how Atlanta’s wild card chances run through (among other teams) Dallas. Uh, no they don’t. These sites, my radio friends, are more clued in than you.
November 24, 2011 at 1:42 pm
I know DVOA, but not the other two. The thing that drives me crazy is not being able to duplicate the stats.
A lot is to be learned when we are all trying to do the same thing, with the same formulas, and having DVOA be proprietary just makes that impossible.
November 24, 2011 at 1:48 pm
Yeah, I cannot find any specific details about cool standings algorithms. I’d love to try them out myself and run them for my games, but with no details, I cannot 😦
November 24, 2011 at 4:54 pm
There isn’t much of an algorithm in any of these cases. You figure out the chance of winning against a median 8-8 team (that percentage comes straight from the Pythagorean), you then assume transitivity (see article below), and you also factor in home field advantage (calculated directly from games and home wins). You also need to know the schedule, and have a random number generator. That’s about it.
You use the odds you calculate to project out the rest of the schedule and you do it enough times to get an accurate calculation based on the knowledge you have.
D-
Updated for clarity.