Beatpaths

A big week for the rankings! A significant reshuffle on par with Week 6. As opposed to previous weeks in which only a couple teams had big moves in the rankings, in Week 10 we have six different teams moving ten or more ranks. Arizona and Washington shoot up, while Buffalo, Denver, [...]

Tom here with commentary on the rankings changes from Week 8.
Stability & Variance
Two big movers this week, Philadelphia and Arizona, each moving over ten ranks. The overall ranking changes have fallen again, demonstrating more overall stability in the rankings after the shakeup in Week 6.

One point of comparison with Week 8 is Week 5. [...]

Hello everyone, Tom here with my post, getting things done at the last minute. Nothing like grading 40 atrocious midterms to suck the time right out of your week. Luckily, I found an extra hour from the switch away from daylight savings. I’ll keep it short and sweet.
Stability & Variance
The Week 7 [...]

Ahoy folks, Tom here with the “Bonfire of the Vanities” edition of this feature. Lots of new stuff to mull over this week, given the changes to the tiebreaker system.
Stability
As you might expect, the rankings have undergone a significant shuffle this week. Three matchups looked like pretty significant upsets:

Philadelphia’s loss to Oakland;
Cincinnati’s loss [...]

Hey everyone, Tom here. Last week I introduced three different ways of looking at the Beatpaths rankings as a whole system:

Stability of the rankings;
Using BeatPower to assess the system’s confidence in picking the winner of a given matchup; and,
Looking backwards to see how well each team’s rank ‘predicts’ its past record.

Stability
Below are two graphs, [...]

Hi folks, Tom here. Last season I did a series of posts looking at the rankings produced by the Beatpaths system, and trying to determine what information we could glean from them. I looked for two things:

Did the Beatpaths system arrive at more accurate rankings as the season progressed? And,
Does the BeatPower score [...]

Tom here with the confidence ranking for the Super Bowl:

Matchup(Winner-Loser)
“Confidence”(out of 100)
BeatPower comparison(predicted winner – predicted loser)
Result

Pittsburgh-Arizona
12.5
85.7-73.2
CORRECT

Beatpaths has a 3-7 pick record in the post-season. One notable difference between the regular season picks and the post-season picks is that very few of the post-season picks are high confidence. Of the ten games played [...]

Tom here with the confidence rankings for the two conference championship games:

Matchup(Winner-Loser)
“Confidence”(out of 100)
BeatPower comparison(predicted winner – predicted loser)
Result

Philadelphia-Arizona
18.6
90.0-71.4
WRONG

Pittsburgh-Baltimore
4.9
85.7-80.8
CORRECT

Both of these picks conform well to the conventional wisdom.
One curious note: Beatpaths has a 1-6 record of predicting the results of Philadelphia games since correctly picking their loss to Baltimore in Week 12. I’ve been [...]

Tom here with the confidence rankings for the four divisional playoff games this week:

Matchup(Winner-Loser)
“Confidence”(out of 100)
BeatPower comparison(predicted winner – predicted loser)
Result

Pittsburgh-San Diego
63.2
85.7-22.5
CORRECT

Carolina-Arizona
23.9
93.5-69.6
WRONG

Tennessee-Baltimore
13.8
94.6-80.8
WRONG

NY Giants-Philadelphia
2.3
92.3-90.0
WRONG

Like last week, the BeatPower comparisons of the matchups produces picks that diverge from the conventional wisdom. The system is most confident about Pittsburgh beating San Diego, whereas most spreads seem to [...]

I didn’t really give picks for the wildcard round since the season was over and since they were divinable by the rankings, but what the heck.
The home teams are all favored this week. A rare week of harmony with the conventional wisdom.
Baltimore at TENNESSEE: No change anywhere if Tennessee wins. If Baltimore wins, [...]