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 16.
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 9-7, but who cares. We are now 143-81, for a 63.8% 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
Week 13: 9-7
Week 14: 14-2
Week 15: 9-7
PITTSBURGH at St. Louis: Pittsburgh has a beatpath to St. Louis. If St. Louis wins, it actually creates a ton of beatloops – one each with Cleveland, Seattle, Cincinnati, and Baltimore. St. Louis is already in a beatloop with Seattle, and Pittsburgh is already in a beatloop with Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Baltimore. Lots of little effects, but this would mostly help Seattle (who would have no beatlosses), and hurt Pittsburgh.
DALLAS at Carolina: Dallas has a beatpath to Carolina. If Carolina wins, it creates a beatloop with Green Bay. Green Bay would have no beatlosses anymore, but it makes no change in the rankings.
Houston at INDIANAPOLIS: Indianapolis has a beatpath to Houston. If Houston wins, it creates a season split, for no change in the graph or rankings.
GREEN BAY at Chicago: Green Bay has a beatpath to Chicago. If Green Bay wins, it would create a season split, busting several beatloops and restoring segments like GB->DET, GB->WAS->CHI, GB->NYG->CHI, GB->SD->CHI, and GB->MIN. Most of that would be beatlooped away in a CHI->DEN->BUF->WAS->CHI beatloop, but the loss of DEN->BUF would have a large effect on the rankings aside from Denver plummeting. If Chicago wins, it would break GB’s win over MIN. Green Bay’s highest quality beatwin would then be over Denver, but it still wouldn’t affect the rankings too much – perhaps putting Green Bay behind Jacksonville.
CLEVELAND at Cincinnati: Cleveland has a beatpath to Cincinnati. If Cincinnati wins, it creates a season split, for no change to the graph or rankings.
Oakland at JACKSONVILLE: Neither team has a beatpath to the other, but Jacksonville is favored. If Jacksonville wins, they get a beatpath to Oakland, but there are no changes in the rankings. If Oakland wins, it creates beatloops with Houston and San Diego, but they are already reinforced for both teams – again no changes in the rankings.
NY GIANTS at Buffalo: The Giants have a beatpath to Buffalo. If Buffalo wins, it creates a beatloop with Detroit and Denver, which creates a cleaner graph and helps PIT, CLE, BUF, and SEA. The Giants would fall.
Kansas City at DETROIT: Detroit has a beatpath to Kansas City. If Kansas City wins, it creates a beatloop with Denver. This helps Pittsburgh and Cleveland (who both seem to want to go up this week), and also slightly helps Denver.
Philadelphia at NEW ORLEANS: Neither team has a beatpath to the other, but New Orleans is slightly favored. If New Orleans wins, they get a beatwin and Philadelphia is hurt. If Philadelphia wins, they enter into a beatloop with Seattle – Tennessee gets hurt and Philadelphia rises. Either way, Philadelphia becomes more defined by this game than New Orleans does.
TAMPA BAY at San Francisco: Tampa Bay has a beatpath to San Francisco. If San Francisco wins, it creates beatloops with Carolina, Atlanta, and New Orleans, which reduces the downward pressure on San Francisco considerably. Tennessee gets hurt again, and San Francisco rises a few slots.
ATLANTA at Arizona: Atlanta is actually favored in this game. If Arizona wins, it takes care of one of the San Francisco beatlosses – but Atlanta would also lose its last beatwin. San Francisco would rise, and Atlanta would fall.
NY Jets at TENNESSEE: Tennessee doesn’t actually have a beatpath to the Jets yet. If they win, they will, but it won’t make a difference in the rankings. If the Jets win, wow, they actually get a beatpath to Tennessee and it verticalizes the graph quite a bit – even Houston would get pushed below the Jets. In this single-game scenario, the Jets would go up eleven, and Tennessee would go down ten.
Baltimore at SEATTLE: Seattle has a beatpath to Baltimore. If Baltimore wins, it creates a beatloop with Cincinnati, but with no real change to the rankings since Cincinnati has another beatwin over Baltimore.
Miami at NEW ENGLAND: New England has a beatpath to Miami. If Miami wins, it creates a season split, for no change in the graph or rankings.
Washington at MINNESOTA: Minnesota has a beatpath to Washington. If Washington wins, it creates a long and interesting beatloop with SD, DEN, and BUF. SD and BUF would rise, while MIN and DEN would fall. WAS would rise a bit, but the effect is bigger on the other teams.
Denver at SAN DIEGO: San Diego has a beatpath to Denver. If Denver wins, it splits the season series with San Diego, for no change in the graph or rankings due to the reinforced beatpath through Detroit.
No “conflict picks” in this half. In fact, every game is a direct beatpath game according to my algorithm, as Jacksonville has a very long beatpath to Oakland.
The only close game in this set is the Detroit=>KC game, where Denver is the only team between them. I don’t run the algorithm on speculative results the way you do, but I think a KC upset would bump Denver up as many as five spots in my algorithm. Their worst remaining loss would be to #15 Houston in stead of #20 Detroit.
Running Doktarr’s algorithm adding only a KC win over DET raised Denver to 9th overall. It appears the loss to Houston wouldn’t hold either since HOU is ranked 15th in the run, and Denver would be one rank higher on the graph (no path to HOU though). It appears Denver would regain their win over Pittsburgh, the main contributor to this rise.
Wow, that’s a big jump for this late in the year.
This has me thinking about teams whose position (either low or high) is based on relatively few wins. For instance, now I’m wondering if a Tampa loss to San Fran could cause Carolina to lose those Seattle and Arizona wins and get demoted into the bottom half where they belong.
That’s why I like the power numbers that I provide. Notice how CLE and CAR are on the same level of the graph, yet Carolina is still way further down in the rankings. You can also check how “stable” a team’s place is by looking at the arrows it has coming out and subtracting the OUT points for those teams. For example:
CAR has 79 out points and 2 out arrows to SEA and ARI.
SEA has 45 out points.
ARI has 31 out points.
This means out of these 79 points, 76 come directly from these two wins. Losing one wouldn’t be too bad, but losing both would clean them out. On the other hand consider Tennessee.
TEN has 202 out points and 2 out arrows to HOU and NO.
HOU has 83 out points.
NO has 34 out ponts.
Without the points from these two, TEN still has 85 points holding them up which means they’re fairly stable where they are.
This also can be looked at from the other direction: stability with regards to moving upwards.
SF’s points in (3763) – ATL’s points in (3565) = 198 which says if they could get rid of their loss to ATL they could move up the chart quite a bit, somewhere around Detroit.
But only three spots above them you have Baltimore. BAL (2832) – MIA (2029) = 803. So even if they get rid of their loss to Miami, the Ravens will still be below Oakland in the ratings.
My algorithm picks Arizona over Atlanta. I like that pick. I’m banking on being 4-2 in “conflict picks” after this week.
Also notable is the Minnesota over Washington pick – this is a relatively rare case where the standard algorithm provides a direct beatpath, but the more vertical graph produced by my algorithm does not. If I went by Moose’s path score rankings that use the graph my algorithm produces, then it still picks the Vikings. It’s not a “conflict pick”, because my algorithm has no pick, but my algorithm suspects a closer game.
You say that we would be insane for using beatpaths for picks because home field isn’t considered. Do you know what beathpaths’ record is when picking the home team to win versus picking the way?
I don’t know what the straight home/away pick record is this season, but in past seasons when I’ve checked that, I think beatpaths was always a little better. I do know, though, that when I’ve experimented with “if the home team is ranked within three slots below the away team, then pick the home team”, then the picks improve a little bit.