Good suggestion. It's not a bad idea to slowly get my feet wet with that because for any new method to be taken seriously, it has to demonstrate much better correlation to win% and much better predictive power for next-game win probability. Can't do this right now though. The databases I have are well suited for post-hoc analysis, but I can't figure out what game was played next very easily lol. I'll slowly work on that though.
No worries, it’s just common sense at this point to factor it in to the overall picture of who’s best..
Ha Ha!! Back to Wilson again?? Holy poop, Batman! Some of you cats are snorting crystal. This is like all of those endless Tanne threads from awhile back. They would go on for like twenty pages then someone would steer it into bizarro world by bringing up Russel Wilson and trying to diminish him, etc? Now Rodgers?? Ha!! When I watched Wilson in college, especially the year at Wisconsin, I knew he would make a very good NFL QB. Aside from his great movements skills, he would just make a ton of NFL type throws. I can't even really dignify the debate with a long response. ....and now Rodgers??? I will just say, lay off the s--t for a while.
I saw an article a few years back where a generic [HomeTeam] 20 [AwayTeam] 17 prediction for every game beat a pool of experts in a tipping competition. From memory it was 1 point for the right winner, 2 points for the right margin and 3 points for the exact score.
Cbrad, I really want to say how much I appreciate your efforts in a) doing the statistics the right way, and b) explaining it in a way that non nerds can understand. I think it interesting that for all the criticism people put on the NFL passer rating that it ends up being one of the tools you use the most. I have used it when doing my stuff because I found it to be simple, robust and easily understood by fans, with the caveat that the passer rating should be adjusted to a base year. The other thing I would like to see done [generally this is not a request for you to do any], is more game theory techniques - especially Nash equilibriums - being used in statistical analysis of the NFL. There’s a lot of analysis I read that says Team [X] was good at [Y] but they did [Y] at a low rate therefore they should do more [Y]. Which is the sort of thing that only makes sense if you assume your opponents never make adjustments based on your actions.
Humans are very good at extrapolating answers from incomplete information, they’re not just very good at getting the right answer. Which is an evolutionary thing, those Homo Sapiens who saw something that was a similar color and maybe the right shape to be a smilidon and ran away passed their genes on, the ones that wanted all the evidence that it actually was a smilidon, and then that the smilidon was hungry and wanted to eat them - they became scat.