NFL Week Fourteen

 (Presented 100% free of Plaxico Burress jokes and commercial interruptions.)

1)  Predictions from last week

            We were 11-5 on Week Thirteen, making us 93-52-1 on the season.  The games on which we were wrong were Denver in New York against the Jets, San Francisco at Buffalo, Carolina at Green Bay, Atlanta at San Diego, and Kansas City at Oakland.   In all five cases we had predicted the home teams would win; in all five cases they lost.   But in all of those cases except one, we would have projected the game wrong even if the projected winners had been on the road.   The one case in which the home field advantage contributed to the wrong prediction was Atlanta at San Diego, which we had predicted as 25-23 San Diego.  It was actually 22-16 Atlanta. 

            Previous research (not by me) has shown that the home field advantage becomes larger in December, expanding from about three points to about five.   I thus have been wrestling with the question of whether I should expand the home field edge for the upcoming predictions, but I’m not going to do it.   The last two weeks, the home teams in the NFL have been 5-11 and 5-11.   Some home field advantage, huh?   I just can’t see projecting a larger home field advantage in that environment.  

2)  Predictions for this week

3)  Updated Rankings          

            Our current rankings are as follows:

             Perhaps the most interesting thing is the re-emergence of Baltimore as an elite team.   I have sort of half-rooted for Baltimore for several years, ever since an Atlanta prosecutor filed bogus murder charges against Ray Lewis in a situation in which it could not possibly have been any more clear that Ray Lewis didn’t have anything to do with what had happened.   Lewis conducted himself throughout the ordeal with dignity, and it re-inforces my pro-Lewis attitudes when people carelessly insinuate that somehow he “got by” with something, when in reality the prosecutor should have been indicted for trying to frame him. 

            Anyway, Baltimore now has five dominating wins in the last seven weeks, despite having been on the road in five of the seven games—a 27-13 win at Miami, 29-10 against Oakland at home, 41-13 at Houston, 36-7 against Philadelphia and 34-3 at Cincinnati.    The other two games are a 37-27 win in Cleveland, and a 30-10 road loss to the Giants. 

            There are four teams in the NFL that have separated themselves from the pack, three of them in the AFC, and yet somehow Denver is going to sail into the playoffs with what amounts to a third-, fourth-place team, the eighth-worst team in football.   And, since they are in position to back off and coast into the playoffs, they may even win a couple in the post-season.   

4)  Team Scoring and Allowing Tendencies

            As you know if you have been reading these commentaries, I have been trying to develop a method to pin down the Scoring and Allowing Tendencies (S&A) of all the times.  .  .Trailblazer tells me that I still don’t have it, but beyond that I can’t figure out what he is trying to say.   I suspect that the method still needs some work. 

            Anyhoo, the method predicts that the number of points scored in a game will be the product of the S&A tendencies of the two teams.   This week Houston is at Green Bay.  Since the S&A numbers are 7.37 (Houston) and 7.83 (Green Bay), the method predicts that 58 points will be scored in the game—7.37 times 7.83.  Washington is at Baltimore.   Since the S&A numbers there are 5.37 (Washington) and 6.01 (Baltimore), the system anticipates that only 32 points will be scored in that game—5.37 times 6.01. 

            These are the current S&A numbers for the 32 NFL teams:

             Week 13 was a low-scoring week in the NFL, and most of the games wound up with fewer points than we had predicted.    Last week there were three games that we predicted would see more than 50 points, and two of them actually did.   But the third game, San Francisco at Buffalo, was the week’s lowest-scoring game, 10-3, so the average for the games that should have been in the fifties was only 44.0.   But that was still higher than averages for the games that should have been in the forties or the thirties: 

           This week six games figure to be in the 50s, six in the thirties, and only four in the forties, although the norm, as we know, is in the 40s.  

6)  NFL Team Temperatures

            Baltimore is now the hottest team in the NFL; St. Louis remains the coldest.   Current NFL Temperatures are:

             Since all of the teams have played twelve games now, I thought I would look at how teams had played in the first six games vs. the second six.   Baltimore, the Jets, the Giants and, believe it or not, Kansas City have been the most improved teams in the NFL:

             Of course, Kansas City has been one of the most improved teams, Chicago has been the most disappointing team, but the Bears are still playing better than the Chiefs.   Everything is relative.   Thirteen teams have been better than average (>100) in both halves of the season, eleven have been worse than average in both halves, and eight have crossed the line one way or the other.  

Hum Baby

            Five NFL teams had their best weeks of the season in Week 13, while three had their worst.   Philadelphia, Denver, Tennessee, Pittsburgh and San Francisco had their best games of the year, by our system.     Arizona, the Jets and the Lions had their worst.