I suspect to a first approximation almost no one other than Baltimore fans, such as Brian Burke, and this blog really believed that Baltimore had much of a chance(+). Well, I should mention Aaron Freeman of Falc Fans, who was rooting for Baltimore but still felt Denver would win. Looking, his article is no longer on the Falcfans site. Pity..
After a double overtime victory by 3 points, it’s awfully tempting to say, “I predicted this”, and if you look at the teams I’ve favored, to this point* the streak of picks is 6-0. Let me point out though, that you can make a limiting assumption and from that assumption figure out how accurate I should have been. The limiting assumption is to assume the playoff model is 100% accurate** and see how well it predicted play. If the model is 100% accurate, the real results and the predicted results should merge.
I can tell you without adding up anything that only one of my favored picks had more than a 70% chance, and at least two were around 52-53%. So 6 times 70 percent is 4.2, and my model, in a perfect world, should have picked no more than 4 winners and 2 losers. A perfect model in a probabilistic world, where teams rarely have 65% chances to win, much less 100%, should be wrong sometimes. Instead, so far it’s on a 6-0 run. That means that luck is driving my success so far.
Is it possible, as I have argued, that strength of schedule is an under appreciated playoff stat, a playoff “Moneyball” stat, that teams that go through tough times are better than their offense and defensive stats suggest? It’s possible at this point. It’s also without question that I’ve been lucky in both the 2012 playoffs and the 2013 playoffs so far.
Potential Championship Scenarios:
Conference Championship Possibilities | |||
---|---|---|---|
Home Team | Visiting Team | Home Win Pct | Est. Point Spread |
NE | BAL | 0.523 | 0.7 |
HOU | BAL | 0.383 | -3.5 |
ATL | SF | 0.306 | -6.1 |
SF | SEA | 0.745 | 7.9 |
My model likes Seattle, which has the second best strength of schedule metric of all the playoff teams, but it absolutely loves San Francisco. It also likes Baltimore, but not enough to say it has a free run throughout the playoffs. Like many modelers, I’m predicting that Atlanta and Seattle will be a close game.
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+ I should also mention that Bryan Broaddus tweeted about a colleague of his who predicted a BAL victory.
* Sunday, January 13, 2013, about 10:00am.
** Such a limiting assumption is similar to assuming the NFL draft is rational; that the customers (NFL teams) have all the information they should, that they understand everything about the product they consume (draft picks), and that their estimates of draft value thus form a normal distribution around the real value of draft picks, and that irrational exuberance, or trends, or GMs falling in love with players play no role in picking players. This, it turns out, makes model simulations much easier.