Tuesday, October 05, 2021

NFL Picks: Weekend Bloodbath!

After three straight weeks of picking 11 of 16 games correctly and remaining in the 97th percentile or above for players of FiveThirtyEight's NFL Forecasting Game, the bottom came out of my tub.

I only picked half the games -- 8 of 16 -- correctly. FiveThirtyEight's model also picked only 8 of 16 correctly.

But as I indicated I would do last week, I bet bigger than FiveThirtyEight did on the odds, with the result that I scored -97.8 points while FiveThirtyEight managed to come it at -14.3.

I'm still out-performing FiveThirtyEight's model overall (total score so far: Me, 127 points; FiveThirtyEight 58.9 points), but now I'm only ahead of 77% of players, falling from the top 100 to ranking 1,543rd of  6,696.

My religion (never bet against the Chiefs) and my scientific finding (think very carefully before betting against Tom Brady) stood me in good stead. I picked up 50 points on those two games, and another 25 points each on Green Bay to beat Pittsburgh and the Bills to beat the Texans.

But I lost nearly 150 points picking the Saints to beat the Giants, the Titans to beat the Jets, and the Falcons to beat The Team That Used To Be The Redskins. I also lost 37 points going against my gut and with FiveThirtyEight's model when I picked the Rams to beat the Cardinals (don't ask me why my gut told me Arizona would pull off that upset, but it did). And so on, and so forth.

I guess I have to redeem myself this coming weekend.

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