In my ongoing campaign to eventually someday be included on King Kaufman’s Panel O’ Experts and compete for his grand prize of dinner at his house, even though I’ll never win, I am posting NFL picks. This is for Week 12.
Please note that if you actually use pure beatpath picks for your own picks, you’re insane. We don’t even pay attention to home field advantage here. Last week we were 8-8, but who cares. We are now 111-65, for a 63.1% pick percentage, but who cares.
Week 1: 9-7
Week 2: 10-6
Week 3: 8-8
Week 4: 8-6
Week 5: 9-5
Week 6: 9-4
Week 7: 11-3
Week 8: 11-2
Week 9: 10-4
Week 10: 7-7
Week 11: 11-5
Week 12: 8-8
GREEN BAY at Dallas: Neither team has a beatpath to the other, but Green Bay is favored. Before this week, this might have been the game of the year since both teams have been highly ranked. But with the NFC collapsing a bit, it’s not even the game of the week. If Green Bay wins, there’s no change due to it beatlooping with Chicago. If Dallas wins, they get a beatpath to Green Bay and rise in the rankings.
San Diego at KANSAS CITY: Neither team has a beatpath to the other, but Kansas City is favored. If Kansas City wins, they get a beatpath to San Diego. If San Diego wins, they split a season series and a few beatloops disappear. This would have a fairly traumatic effect on the graph, as San Diego is one of those split personality teams and this would mean its other personality would become dominant. San Diego would rise significantly and Kansas City would fall significantly.
San Francisco at CAROLINA: Neither team has a beatpath to the other, but Carolina is favored. They’re each playing for a beatwin over the other team.
ATLANTA at St. Louis: Atlanta has a beatpath to St. Louis. If St. Louis wins, it creates a four-team beatloop among the dregs of the league, and they would be among the bottom five teams in the league. God, the NFC West sucks.
JACKSONVILLE at Indianapolis: Neither team has a beatpath to the other, but Jacksonville is actually favored in this one. It’s also the game of the week, as they are ranked higher than Green Bay and Dallas. If Jacksonville wins, no changes in the rankings although their beatwin over San Diego would re-emerge. If Indianapolis wins, they’d regain their beatwin over Jacksonville and rise in the rankings again.
SEATTLE at Philadelphia: Neither team has a beatpath to the other, but Seattle is slightly favored. If Seattle wins, they get a beatpath to Philadelphia, which hurts Philadelphia (and Washington) and helps Cleveland. If Philadelphia wins, they beatloop with Chicago, which breaks apart another key beatloop having to do with Denver and Pittsburgh. CHI->DEN->PIT would emerge in the graph, which would have a fairly large effect on the rankings again, especially with Chicago really shooting up in the rankings.
NY JETS at Miami: The Jets have a beatpath to Miami. If Miami wins, they’d create a season split and shed the beatloss.
BUFFALO at Washington: Neither team has a beatpath to the other, but Buffalo is favored. Either way it turns out, this game is going to be all about the awful death of Taylor. If Buffalo wins, it would subtly hurt the Giants. If Washington wins, the entire NFC East (save Philadelphia) is helped in the rankings quite a bit, leapfrogging several other teams. Both teams are playing for a beatwin.
DETROIT at Minnesota: Neither team has a beatpath to the other, but Detroit is favored. If Detroit wins, they get a beatwin back, for no change in the rankings. If Minnesota wins, NYG->DET re-emerges – Dallas and the Giants both get pushed up in the rankings.
TENNESSEE at Houston: A close matchup. Tennessee has a beatwin over Houston. If Houston wins, they shed the beatloss but there is no real change in the rankings.
DENVER at Oakland: Denver has a beatpath to Oakland. If Oakland wins, they split a season series, but with no change to the rankings since Denver has a reinforced beatpath to them.
CLEVELAND at Arizona: Cleveland has a beatpath to Arizona. If Arizona wins, it creates a beatloop with Baltimore, for no real change in the graph or rankings due to reinforced beatpaths.
NY GIANTS at Chicago: Neither team has a beatpath to the other, but the Giants are favored. The Giants would beatloop with Green Bay if they won, for no real change. They’d beatloop with Detroit if Chicago wins, for no real change. An essentially meaningless outcome, at least for this week, barring other graph dynamic changes.
TAMPA BAY at New Orleans: Tampa Bay has a beatpath to New Orleans. If New Orleans wins, they’d split a season series which would obliterate a couple of beatloops involving Seattle and Jacksonville, but the beatloops are reinforced by other games, so it would have no real change in the graph or rankings.
Cincinnati at PITTSBURGH: Pittsburgh has a beatpath to Cincinnati. If Cincinnati wins, it’d bust a beatloop with the Jets and Cincinnati would regain their beatwin – it would help Cleveland, and hurt Washington and Philadelphia – same phenomenon if Seattle beats Philadelphia, curiously enough.
NEW ENGLAND at Baltimore: New England has a beatpath to Baltimore. If Baltimore wins, it creates several beatloops – with CIN, SD, BUF, and CLE. Teams subtly helped: SF, SD, CLE. Teams subtly hurt: MIN.
Only one difference in my graph is immedietly apparent: ATL does not have a beatpath to STL. However, ATL is still favored. I’m not yet sure what different results would do to my graph, but I assume most of them would be similar to yours.
P.S. If you don’t know me, I introduced myself last night in “Week 12 Beatpaths Rankings”.
On a side note, my numbers-based ranking program predicts somewhat different results.
1) DAL(#3) over GB(#5). DAL is slightly higher ranked because of their offense, and it’s a home game for them.
WAS(#7) over BUF(#20). BUF gets a boost in the graphs because of their beatwin over CIN. The NFC East is better than its graph position.
2) SD(#6) over KC(#24). While KC’s defense is competetive, their offense is horrible.
3) CAR(#29) over SF(#32). Agreement here.
4) ATL(#30) over STL(#31). Agreement. I can’t believe STL is favored by 4 points in most places.
5) IND(#4) over JAC(#11). My program gives JAC a 4.6% chance of upset, very low for a non-NE game.
6) PHI(#10) over SEA(#12). Reinforced because the game is in PHI.
7) MIA(#22) over NYJ(#28). MIA should finally get its first win this week!
9) MIN(#13) over DET(#16). This would be a close game, except for the fact that it’s in MIN.
10) TEN(#19) over HOU(#18). Agreement only because the game is in TEN.
11) OAK(#26) over DEN(#23). A close game, but OAK has HFA.
12) CLE(#15) over ARI(#25). Agreement, even though a CLE beatpath to CIN and ARI losing the double header means the graph is too lopsided.
13) NYG(#8) over CHI(#17). Agreement, though in a numbers-based system, no game is “meaningless”.
14) TB(#9) over NO(#21). Agreement.
15) PIT(#2) over CIN(#14). Agreement, though CIN has a jinx on their side, having won their last 2 games in PIT, including during PIT’s super bowl year. (FYI I am a Steelers fan)
16) NE(#1) over BAL(#27). Agreement. This game gets the “most lopsided game of the week” award from both systems.
Does this thing limit the number of characters allowed? It chopped off the end of my last post. I had commented that my system gave less than a 1% chance of upset for the NE>BAL game.
There doesn’t appear to be a character limit given the gargantuan post I had in the week 12 thread. Chances are using a greater than symbol was interpreted as an HTML tag and got eaten.
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My numbers agree with TT’s choices in all cases except:
Both my standard and weighted graphs pick IND/JAC
The two systems disagree on these games, MIN-DET, PHI-SEA, SD-KC, SF-CAR, WAS-BUF. In each case the standard version agrees with TT and the weighted version picks against it.
After further modifying my graph using Doktarr’s formula (Before I saw it under Doktarr’s name, I had been trying to come up with such a formula, but had been failing), two of my beatpath-based picks changed, namely to SD->KC and IND->JAC, because SD gets a beatpath to KC through DEN and IND->JAC reemerges.
P.S. Looks like the numbers are 1-0 and the beatpaths 0-1 after GB@DAL. Not that it changes much; a DAL->GB arrow is added to the charts, but that’s it.
TT, you should be proud; you’ve created a legion of imitators. It’s the sincerest form of flattery.
Since I’m not creating any actual rankings, I can only note games where the graph using my iterative approach explicitly contradicts your pick – i.e. where there is a beatpath. Those are:
Indianapolis over Jacksonville
San Diego over Kansas City
Washington over Buffalo
I’ll be curious to collect all these approaches and run them through my backtester.
“conflict picks” were 2-1. That and $2.38 gets me a coffee.
ehhehehe
TT, Just curious, are you going to do a beatpaths graph for the college football universe, now that the “regular season” games are done? I know you did something like that in previous years, and I know several of us would be interested in seeing how those teams stack up.
I know with a lot more teams and less games per team, things don’t work out quite as nicely as the NFL universe, but I do find it interesting anyway.
I’ve really been thinking about it – my college version is in a bit of disarray right now. I had originally given up on it because my powerbook g4 got too hot before it finished figuring everything out.
But I have a macbook now. This year in particular will be interesting because there are so few undefeated teams.
I was just thinking that a NCAA div 1 football graph would be interesting. In truth, it’s more useful there than anywhere, because it considers a lot more data in comparing conferences than human polls do. And unlike in other sports, they don’t get to settle it on the field.