Tuesday, October 12, 2021

NFL Picks: My Decline Continues ...

Last week, I picked 8 of 16 NFL games correctly in FiveThirtyEight's NFL Forecasting Game. FiveThirtyEight's model also picked 8 of 16. But due to my "bet big" strategy, I under-performed the model, scoring -97.8 points to its -14.3. I was still out-performing the model long-term (127 points to its 58.9), but fell to 77th% percentile among players and 1,543rd place of 6,696 on the leaderboard.

This week, I picked 10 of 16 games correctly, and managed to get back into positive points territory. But FiveThirtyEight's model picked 11 of 16 games and, due to my "bet big" strategy racked up 96.7 points to my 24.6. The model is now ahead of me long-term, 155.6 points to 151.6 points, and I've fallen to 66th percentile and 2,385th place among 6,992 players.

My big point loss -- 75 points -- was giving the Chiefs 100% to beat the Bills (the model picked wrong, too, but only lost 11 points).

I also lost 37.4 points on two games, picking the Raiders to beat the Bears and the Panthers to beat the Eagles. FiveThirtyEight lost 24 points and 18.9 points respectively betting the same ways but with lower odds.

The games I got wrong that FiveThirtyEight got right: I picked the 49ers to beat the Cardinals (-3.1 points for me, 16 points for the model), and the Jaguars to beat the Titans (-3.1 points for me, 14.8 points for the model).

The only game I got right that the model got wrong was me betting on the Rams to beat the Seahawks. That gained me 14.1 points and lost the model 4.2 points.

Am I going to give up on my "bet big on games I'm pretty sure about or as required by the Chiefs religion" strategy? Nope. Not yet, anyway. Go big or go home, and I'm home anyway.

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