I had reported here on Monday that we were 11-3 for our predictions for Sunday.  That was a miscount; we were actually 10-3, but with the win for Pittsburgh on Monday night that makes us 11-3, which makes us 53-31 on the year.   Pittsburgh’s big win, however, pushes their ranking upward by 1.8 points, which is enough to make them the best team in football:

             Pennsylvania has got it goin’ on.   Let’s play the Super Bowl in Harrisburg this year.    For the Thursday night game, Denver at Cleveland, we see it as Cleveland by ten.

            Small point of pride. . .the Bears started out 1-2, but we had them ranked anyway at 109.8, one of the best teams in football.  They’re now 5-3, so they have justified our belief in them.

            Other teams, not so much; in our first rankings we had Denver at 113.8 and Dallas at 116.2.    Now that we have more stable rankings, we can look back and see that our first effort, based on limited data, was very close on about half the teams, but totally off on the other half.   We started out with Tennessee at 112.2 and Philadelphia at 111.5—about where they are now—but our initial rankings for the New England/Miami/Jets cluster, when they had mostly just played one another, did turn out to be too low.    You just can’t really rate teams accurately on three games, and I could have guessed that anyway, but I’d still prefer to start the rankings out with what the rankings show on this season’s performance, rather than dragging in last year’s games.   I think what I might do next year, to stabilize the early season data, is create a mythical “33^rd team”, and assume that every team has played that 33^rd team once and played them to a 10-10 tie.  That will avoid the exaggerated early-season numbers. .. .New England at 78.2. . .but without distortions based on what teams did last season. 

            How do you guys feel about the NFL going to 18 games?   I’d have to say I don’t like it, but maybe for bad reasons.   I grew up sort of thinking, if one can call it thought, that baseball was everything and the other sports were competitors.   When the NFL expanded to 16 games in 1978, I hated it because I figured that whatever made the NFL bigger and stronger was bad for baseball.   I look back on that now as immature thinking.   Baseball is a great sport, basketball is a great sport, football is a great sport, and anyway, we’re all kind of in the same current; what helps one of us, helps all of us. 

            I look back and think that the 12-game schedule that the NFL played in my youth was ridiculously short, but 18 still seems too long.   But I will say this:  that if it’s a choice between expanding the regular season or expanding the playoffs, they’re a lot better off expanding the regular season.