Beatpaths

Hey all! This is your old pal Kenneth here again, ready to give completely useless commentary on the rankings once again. Site owner ThunderThumbs asked me to help out, but I couldn’t make it the last few weeks, so I’m here now. Let’s get to it!

Rank
Team
Notes
Last Week
BeatPower

1

(Beat OAK) The Broncos are on [...]

Another relatively accurate week.
Isaacson-Tarbell was 12-4. Beatpaths was 12-4. They disagreed on two games, though, and ITB ended up 13-3, missing only on DET>WAS, JAC>HOU, and NE>ATL. I was also 13-3, so I’m still tied.
Also, now that we’re through the first three weeks of the season, I’m going to pick a tiebreaker to use for [...]

Ranking for Week 2 – note we’re still using an inferior tie-breaker as we wait for things to shake out a little more. We respect the beatpath graph, and otherwise rely on the previous week’s rankings. This means that if a previous season’s “bad” team beats a previous season’s “good” team, the losing teams sink [...]

Time for the Week 3 picks.
The “official picks” should again be considered the ITB picks, the last column. My “personal picks” had the same record as the “official pics” in week 2, so, still tied there.

There are three BeatPicks – picks that are dictated by the graph itself. As for my personal picks, I’ll [...]

I messed up a bit on the previous bit of backtesting, although the way I messed up was informative. The previous round of backtesting tested the beatflukes variant (not vanilla), and each year had all the game results of the previous seasons in my dataset. So, 2006’s results was using a beatpath graph based off [...]

I’ve managed to fire up my old wonky backtesting system. It doesn’t have a lot of ability yet, but it gives some interesting information. Here’s what I’ve found.

Year
Random
uNet
Prev. Week
Beatloop Str.
Fractional
BPower/Win/Loop
Str. of Beatwins
Bucklin
UPower
UPower/Loop
UNet-Lookahead

2004 (84-57)
150-117
166-101
157-110
160-107
164-103
167-100
166-101
161-106
164-103
161-106
157-110

2005 (91-45)
162-105
152-115
152-115
162-105
156-111
160-107
151-116
156-111
156-111
157-110
152-115

2006 (94-52)
156-111
163-104
159-108
161-106
163-104
167-100
164-103
164-103
163-104
161-106
159-108

2007 (89-43)
162-105
164-103
169-98
162-105
165-102
167-100
158-109
166-101
165-102
171-96
169-98

2008 (80-48)
158-108
159-107
160-106
156-110
163-103
159-107
160-106
160-106
163-103
161-105
160-106

TOTAL: 64.13%
59.03%
60.22%
59.70%
60.00%
60.75%
61.42%
59.85%
60.45%
60.75%
60.75%
59.70%

So, there’s some food for thought. Here’s how to read it – the records in parentheses are the [...]

A new graph, and the first interesting one of the 2009 season. Beatpaths picks were 12-4 this week – the other two were slightly worse – we’ll review them when we make the Week 3 picks. Remember that the top of the graph does not necessarily mean the highest-ranked team – it might just be [...]

Time for the 2nd week of picks! I’m going to try something different this week, a grid showing the different pick techniques we’ve been discussing.
The “official picks” should be considered the ITB picks, the last column. I haven’t yet decided if I will track personal picks all year long, but just for the record, [...]

Time for the season’s first power rankings! These rankings respect all the wins and losses so far, and otherwise tiebreak according to the rankings at the end of last season, after the Super Bowl. For the early part of the season, we’re not using any other tiebreakers, so that simply means that a [...]

My favorite time of the year, the first beatpath graph of the season. Rather useless, but look at the pretty colors!