Back in August, I asked you 38 questions that served as prop bets for the 2017 NFL season. Thanks to the tireless work of Jeremy De Shelter, who helped compile all the results. Earlier this offseason, I looked at Part I and Part II. Let’s move on to Part III…

Number of playoff (non-Super Bowl) games won by the visiting team, +0.5
Maximum number of TDs thrown by Kirk Cousins in a single game

Cousins topped out at 3 passing TDs in a single game, done four times in 2017.  Meanwhile, road teams won… 3 games in the 2017 playoffs, with Atlanta and Tennessee winning on the road in the Wild Card round, and Jacksonville winning in Pittsburgh in the second round.

That Steelers loss was critical: only 39% of you picked the road playoff wins side, which means the Jaguars upset gave the minority group the win.

Punts by Jets opponents, -5
Jets team offensive passer rating.

The Jets were supposed to be terrible on offense and not too bad on defense, making this a tricky one to analyze.  The votes here were pretty split, with 53% of contestants voting for the Jets offensive passer rating side to be higher.  Jets opponents had 87 punts in the league last year the 4th most behind Jacksonville, Arizona, and Denver.

Meanwhile the Jets passing attack was surprisingly…. decent? New York finished with an 86.1 passer rating, slightly above the league average of 85.1, and 15th-best in the NFL.

In other words, this was a good line where the hook made the difference! The line finishes 82 vs. 86.1, swinging the side towards the brave 47% who backed the Jets passing attack. [continue reading…]

Below you will find 38 pairs of numbers. In each case, you tell me which number will be bigger. One point for each correct answer. Most points wins.

Ties — and I expect there to be a nontrivial number of them — go to the side that had fewer votes. For example, here is a pair:

Number of wins by the Lions
Number of wins by the Ravens

Let’s say 49 people take the Lions and 44 take the Ravens. If the Lions and Ravens end up with the same number of wins, then each Ravens-backer will get a point and each Lions-backer will not.  Last year, JimZornsLemma won with 25 correct guesses out of 38; the average was just 19 correct guesses. Thanks to Jeremy De Shetler for an assist on some of this year’s questions.

GRAND PRIZE: the main prizes will be (1) honor and (2) glory. There may also be some sort of trinket to be named later. By the time this thing is over, more than five months will have passed, so that gives me some time to scrape something together. But you probably shouldn’t enter unless honor and glory are sufficient.

MORE RULES:

1. Everyone is limited to one entry per person. This will be enforced by the honor system. If caught breaking this rule, you, your children, and your children’s children will be banned from all future FP contests.

2. I won’t enter the contest myself, which will allow me to arbitrate any dispute impartially. Any ambiguity in the rules will be clarified by me in whatever way causes me the least amount of hassle.

3. While there are quite a few items that refer in some way to the NFL postseason, unless specifically stated, all the items below refer to regular season totals only.

5. You may enter until 1:00 p.m. Eastern time on Sunday, September 17th, 2016. However, there’s an incentive to entering early because…

6. In the event that the contest ends in a tie, the winner will be the person whose entry was submitted first.

HOW TO ENTER: PLEASE READ IF YOU WANT TO ACTUALLY ENTER THE CONTEST.

Cut-and-paste the list of questions below into your editor of choice, THEN DELETE THE CHOICES you don’t like (thereby leaving the ones you do like), and then cut-and-paste your 38 answers into the comments of this thread. Please do not edit the text in any way other than deleting half of it. If you want to leave non-entry comments, you are free to do so either at the very end of your entry or in a subsequent comment, but please do not put commentary in the body of your entry. [continue reading…]

In 2002, the league realigned its division format with the addition of the Houston Texans. From 2003 to 2015, of the 156 teams that made the playoffs, 75 of them were not in the playoffs a year ago. In other words, about 5.8 teams each year make the leap from out of the playoffs to into the playoffs, with the remaining 6.2 teams being repeat entrants.

If we had run this study four years ago, those numbers would be flipped: from ’03 to ’11, 6.3 of the playoff teams each year were new, but in recent years, there has been less turnover among playoff teams. Last year, only four teams — Kansas City, Houston, Minnesota, and Washington — took the leap. The graph below shows the number of teams to make the jump from out of to into the playoffs in each year:

[continue reading…]

Before the season began, I hosted a contest where I asked you to submit 38 questions. Each question asked you about 38 pairs of numbers, with the contestant trying to guess which number will be bigger. I also calculated the percentage that each “side” of the bet received, based on 82 entries.

In early January, I looked at the first 19 questions (that post has been updated since the playoff results).  Yesterday, I looked at the remaining set of questions. Today, the contest results.

Here were the answers to each question, along with the percentage of entries that guessed correctly: [continue reading…]

Before the season began, I hosted a contest where I asked you to submit 38 questions. Each question asked you about 38 pairs of numbers, with the contestant trying to guess which number will be bigger. I also calculated the percentage that each “side” of the bet received, based on 82 entries.

In early January, I looked at the first 19 questions (that post has been updated since the playoff results).  Today, we’ll look at the remaining set of questions. Tomorrow, the contest results.

20t: Number of COMBINED receiving TDs by Pierre Garcon; Eddie Royal; Jarvis Landry; and Percy Harvin (0.671) vs. Number of receiving TDs by the player with the MOST in this group: Dez Bryant; Odell Beckham; Julio Jones; and A.J. Green (0.329) [continue reading…]

Before the season began, I hosted a contest where I asked you to submit 38 questions. Each question asked you about 38 pairs of numbers, with the contestant trying to guess which number will be bigger. I also calculated the percentage that each “side” of the bet received, based on 82 entries.  Let’s look at how you guys did, in descending order based on votes, beginning with the question where everyone was the most confident. Spoiler: that question didn’t go so well for the wisdom of crowds.

1: Number of wins by the team with the second-most wins (0.878) vs. Number of wins by Washington and Oakland combined (0.122)

Washington surprisingly won 9 games, while Oakland finished 7-9.  That means the teams combined for 16 wins, which would have been good enough to beat any one team.  In retrospect, this one looks pretty obvious — the second-most wins was 13, by Arizona — but a whopping 87.8% of you picked “the field minus one” over Washington/Oakland.  You like that?

2t: Number of wins by the Ravens (0.841) vs. Number of wins by the Lions (0.159)

OK, you guys are not off to a hot start. Most of my questions were intended to draw something close to 50/50 action; I knew this question was not going to do that, but I threw it in anyway as an homage to Doug Drinen, who used it as the prototype example in the first edition of this contest at PFR.

Well, Detroit finished 7-9 ,while Baltimore went 5-11. Score another one for the underdogs.
[continue reading…]

On September 7th, I announced the 38 Questions Contest. There were 82 entries, so that gives us some data to analyze. Let’s look at what turned out to be the most lopsided questions:

1) Number of wins by the team with the second-most wins (72) vs. Number of wins by Washington and Oakland combined (10)

I am not surprised that more people voted for the first option there, but the magnitude caught me off guard. Last year, the team with the second-most wins had 12 wins, although it had been 13 in each of the previous five years. If you had to guess, 13 is probably the most likely answer here, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that Washington and Oakland aren’t likely to combine for 13 (or more) wins.  This one looked like a slam dunk after week one, but is on shakier ground after week two. [continue reading…]

Below you will find 38 pairs of numbers. In each case, you tell me which number will be bigger. One point for each correct answer. Most points wins.

Ties — and I expect there to be a nontrivial number of them — go to the side that had fewer votes. For example, here is a pair:

Number of wins by the Lions
Number of wins by the Ravens

Let’s say 41 people take the Lions and 54 take the Ravens. If the Lions and Ravens end up with the same number of wins, then each Lions-backer will get a point and each Ravens-backer will not.

GRAND PRIZE: the main prizes will be (1) honor and (2) glory. There will also be some sort of trinket to be named later. By the time this thing is over, more than five months will have passed, so that gives me some time to scrape something together. But you probably shouldn’t enter unless honor and glory are sufficient.

MORE RULES:

1. Everyone is limited to one entry per person. This will be enforced by the honor system. If caught breaking this rule, you, your children, and your children’s children will be banned from all future FP contests.

2. I won’t enter the contest myself, which will allow me to arbitrate any dispute impartially. Any ambiguities in the rules will be clarified by me in whatever way causes me the least amount of hassle.

3. While there are quite a few items that refer in some way to the NFL postseason, unless specifically stated, all the items below refer to regular season totals only. For example, here’s a pair:

Margin of the Titans biggest win.
Number of Passing TDs thrown by Marcus Mariota.

This one will be decided based on the Titans regular season and Mariota’s regular season numbers. I’d hate for there to be confusion when Tennessee wins a playoff game by 28.

4. If you try to get cute and complain that the Titans one-point win over the Colts was actually their “biggest win” even though it wasn’t their win with the biggest point margin, see rule #2. Ignoring your comment is generally my hassle-minimization strategy of choice.

5. You may enter until 1:00 p.m. Eastern time on Sunday, September 13th, 2015. However, you can earn a bonus of two (2) points if you enter before kickoff of Thursday’s game.

6. In the event that the contest ends in a tie, the winner will be the person whose entry was submitted first.

HOW TO ENTER: Cut-and-paste the list of questions below into your editor of choice, delete the choices you don’t like (thereby leaving the ones you do like), and then cut-and-paste your 38 answers into the comments of this thread. Do not worry about whether the players are linked to their PFR page or not. Please do not edit the text in any way other than deleting half of it. If you want to leave non-entry comments, you are free to do so either at the very end of your entry or in a subsequent comment, but please do not put commentary in the body of your entry. [continue reading…]

In case you haven’t heard, the St. Louis Rams are running a contest to predict the team’s 2014 schedule. lThe prize is $100,000, which sounds nice until you realize that to win, you must accurately predict not only the opponent each week, but the location and the exact day of the game. Nobody is going to win this contest. Nobody is going to come close to winning the contest. It’s a personal information/PR grab and nothing more.  Normally, this wouldn’t bother me, but it’s not like the Rams are giving away a billion dollars.  For a hundred grand — which is less than two percent of the amount of dead cap space being allocated to Cortland Finnegan this season — the team shouldn’t have needed to make it impossible for anybody to win. Considering the rules, St. Louis might as well have announced that the grand prize is eleventy billion dollars.

So what are the odds of winning this contest? Let’s start with an easier problem than the one at hand: predicting the Rams opponent in each week of the season.

With 17 weeks, there are 17 possible opponents once you include home/road designations and the bye week. Therefore, you have a 1-in-17 chance of correctly guessing the Rams opponent in week one. By extension, you have a 1-in-16 chance of correctly guessing who St. Louis plays in week two, assuming you were correct with your guess in week one (this is what we mean by conditional probabilities). Do this for every week of the season, and by week 17, you have a 100% chance of correctly guessing who is on the team’s schedule.

It may not be intuitive exactly how daunting a task this is. But this is much, much harder than Warren Buffet’s bracket contest.  For example, you only have a a 1-in-272 chance of correctly guessing who the Rams opponents will be in the first two weeks of the season. That drops to 1-in-4,080 through three weeks, 1-in-8.9 million through six weeks, and 1-in-8.8 billion through nine weeks. That already makes it harder than the bracket contest, and you still have the back eight to play. The odds of correctly guessing the opponent each week is 1-in-356 trillion. And remember, this is quite a bit easier than the actual contest!

But let’s make some adjustments based on the information we know (which will lower the odds) and the added conditions one must satisfy (which will drastically increase the odds).

Adjustment #1

The first adjustment to our 1-in-356 trillion likelihood lowers the odds. If we assume that each team plays a division opponent in week 17, that makes the contest ever so slightly easier. If we work in reverse order, you now have a 1-in-6 chance of guessing the week 17 opponent (remember, you need to specify game location), a 1-in-16 chance of guessing the week 16 opponent assuming your week 17 selection was correct, and so on. This improves your odds all the way to 1-in-126 trillion. Hooray? [continue reading…]

In the summer, I ran a contest to predict the final stats that Tom Brady would produce in 2013. Suffice it to say, nearly everyone was much more bullish on Brady than they should have been: of the 21 contest entries, 19 of them projected Brady to finish with a better ANY/A average than what he actually produced.

The average entry predicted 603 pass attempts, 4,467 yards, 30.8 TDs, 10.4 INTs, 28 sacks, and 139 sack yards lost, for an average ANY/A of 7.09.  In reality, Brady ended the year with 628 attempts, 4,343 yards, 25 TDs, 11 INTs, 40 sacks, and 256 sack yards lost. Basically, the group over-projected his Yards per Attempt by half a yard, expected six more touchdowns, and 12 fewer sacks. Brady’s ANY/A was 6.13, nearly one full adjusted net yard below the average projection.

The winning entry goes to Joe: [continue reading…]

On September 13, 2008, Doug Drinen wrote this post, which I reproduce in full below.

I’m hearing and reading a lot of crazy stuff this week.

So I just want to document my predictions that (a) the Patriots will win at least 11 games this year, (b) the Patriots will clinch the East before week 17, and (c) Matt Cassel will be a top-12 fantasy quarterback from here out.

That is all.

With the combination arrest/release of Aaron Hernandez stacked upon five surgeries in seven months for Rob Gronkowski and the departure of Wes Welker to Denver, it’s fair to say that many are wondering about the fate of the New England passing game. In addition to those three, Tom Brady is without Brandon Lloyd (free agent) and Danny Woodhead (San Diego), the fourth and fifth leading receivers on the 2012 Patriots. As Jason Lisk pointed out, that puts Brady in historically bad territory when it comes to roster turnover.

So today’s post doubles as a temperature check and a contest entry. Please predict the following for Tom Brady in 2013, based on the assumption that he is responsible for 99.4% of all Patriots pass attempts by quarterbacks for the second year in a row. To the extent he is not, I will pro-rate his numbers for purposes of judging the contest. To enter, simply copy and paste this table below in the comments and fill out each line.

Your name:
Brady’s number of pass attempts:
Brady’s number of passing yards:
Brady’s number of passing touchdowns:
Brady’s number of interceptions:
Brady’s number of sacks:
Brady’s number of sack yards lost:
Commentary:
[continue reading…]

Last week Chase announced this contest in honor of Football Perspective’s first birthday. Here’s the backstory…

A couple of years ago, I moved. The house I was moving into, like many houses, had walls. The walls did not have artwork pre-installed, so I spent a good six months of my life obsessed with finding good wall-art. Somewhere in there, I stumbled on the open-source visualization program called Gephi. It looked super-cool, so I decided to play around with it.

The bug/bean/Australia/peanut/hairball Chase posted last week is the result. In addition to framing one for my own wall, I framed one each for Chase and Lisk, and I mailed them off. I don’t use the word “hero” very often, but really, what other word is there for someone who is talented enough to create world-class art and generous enough to send it to his friends? This was a good thing I had done. So what’s a hero to do when he is told, tactfully of course, by both Chase and Lisk, that his art kinda sucks? I thought the bean’s worth was self-evident.

The mechanics are straightforward. I don’t even remember the specifics but, as you all figured out, this is a roster of the best players in modern-ish NFL/AFL history. The size of a player’s dot represents his quality, as measured by career AV or 100-95-90-… AV — I can’t remember which. The strength of a connection between two players is the number of games they played with and against each other. So Peyton Manning is strongly connected to Marvin Harrison, less connected to Tom Brady, still less connected to Brian Urlacher, and not at all connected to Dan Fouts or Bill George. The layout was determined by Gephi’s “force atlas” algorithm. My understanding is that it pretends the connections are elastic bands — the stronger the connection the tauter the band — and then lets the physics take over. Manning and Harrison naturally end up close together because they are connected by a tight band. Urlacher sort of wants to be close to Manning, but there are tighter bands pulling him in other directions so he doesn’t get too close. He does get closer than Dan Fouts does, though.
[continue reading…]

Football Perspective turns one tomorrow. To celebrate, Doug Drinen has come up with a contest centered around the following picture.

Question 1: Explain what this is a picture of.

Question 2: Make a case to your real or hypothetical significant other that this is worthy of being printed, framed, and hung on your wall.
[continue reading…]