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 have been posting NFL picks. We’ve just finished with the regular season. For the final week, we posted our only losing record of the season, at 6-10.
So that means for the season we are now (drumroll) 159-97, for a 62.1% pick percentage. That puts us in 17th place for the Panel of Experts, a slide from the middle of the season when we ranked near the top – but still one game ahead of King himself!
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
Week 16: 10-6
Week 17: 6-10
Interesting. Running the cumulative numbers, it doesn’t look like the beatpaths picks dropped off in accuracy–started low at 56%, rose to a high of 65%, then mostly stayed at about that range, falling to 62% at the end (due to an 8-8 final weekend)
Do you think that the humans just got better at picking games as the season went on, or maybe there’s some other reason to explain the slide?
I think this was the worst final weekend of the last three seasons in terms of teams not having reason to play their starters… last season was very strong that way. So I think there were probably some obvious “asterisk” picks. But beyond that, I’m not sure why others got a lot better in the second half of the season.