Barack Obama was not the only winner in the 2012 presidential election. Nate Silver, now founder and editor in chief of Five Thirty Eight, and other stats-y election forecasters basked in the praise that came when the returns matched their predictions.

But part of the praise was overstated. At the very end, Silver’s models essentially called Florida a toss-up, with the probability of an Obama win going just a few tenths of a percentage point above 50%. But because his model gave Obama the slightest of edges in Florida, his forecast in most of the media essentially became a predicted Obama win there. In addition to accurately forecasting the national popular vote, Silver then received credit for predicting all fifty states correctly.

I am all in favor of stats winning, but the flip side of this is the problem. If Obama had not won Florida, Silver’s prediction―which, like that of other forecasters such as Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium, was excellent―would have been no less good. ^[1]This is a column about football, but you might want to check out some of the stuff through that link on the differences between Silver and Wang on the upcoming midterm elections. They both know way … Continue reading And if stats folks bask too much in the glow when everything comes up on the side where the probabilities leaned, what happens the next time when people see a 25% event happening and say that it invalidates the model? ^[2]Of course, maybe Football Outsiders has already run into that with the 2007 Super Bowl prediction. Perhaps sports people are ahead of politics on this stuff.

Lots of people have made this point before — heck, Silver wrote about this in his launch post at the new 538 — but it is really useful to think carefully about the uncertainty in our predictions. Neil has done that with his graphs depicting the distribution of team win totals at 538, and Chase did so in this post last Saturday. Football Outsiders does this in its Almanac every year, with probabilities on different ranges of win totals. [continue reading…]

Here are my NFL projected standings for 2014, but with a twist: I’m ranking the teams from most confident to least confident in their final records. In other words, these are rankings with implied variances, too. If you think this is just a way for me to have built-in excuses for missing on teams in the bottom ten, you are completely wrong and I would never do that.

1) Denver Broncos: 12-4

There may be no more exciting team to watch on the field than the Broncos. Of course, there’s no more boring team to talk about, which is why the Broncos take the place atop my confidence leaderboard. Absent a Peyton Manning injury, Denver will sleepwalk to 12 wins. Games against Seattle, San Francisco, and New England will be must-see television, and also serve to guard against predicting a 14-2 sort of season. The additions of DeMarcus Ware, T.J. Ward, and Aqib Talib, along with the return of Ryan Clady on offense, means the Broncos are fielding their deepest team of the Manning era.

2) New England Patriots: 12-4

Even when the Patriots aren’t very good, they still win 12 games. The offense has a lot of question marks at wide receiver, but Shane Vereen and Rob Gronkowski can mitigate those concerns when healthy. The defense has five Pro Bowl caliber players on defense with Vince Wilfork, Chandler Jones, Jerod Mayo, Darrelle Revis and Devin McCourty.  Three others — Rob Ninkovich, Dont’a Hightower, and Jamie Collins — look to be above-average starters, too. This should be the team’s best defense in a long time (and will be even better once Brandon Browner returns from suspension), which makes New England have a higher floor than any team in the NFL.

3) Seattle Seahawks: 12-4

Do you really need explanation here? The only reason I’ve got Seattle down at 3 instead of 1 is I see a bit more variance in their potential outlook.  The Seahawks are the clear best team in the league to me, so a 15-1 season isn’t out of the question; ^[1]For what it’s worth, while it’s a bit easier to be higher on Seattle after their strong performance in week 1, I did predict the Seahawks to win against Green Bay. of course, a very difficult schedule could lead to a 10-6 year, too.

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Which team will be the biggest surprise in 2014? Last year, the Houston Texans shocked Vegas and analytics fiends alike. Before the season, the Texans’ over/under win total was 10.5. Football Outsiders Almanac projected them to have 9.3 wins and gave them a 67% chance of making the playoffs. Basically nobody saw the 2013 Texans’ implosion to 30th in DVOA coming. Interestingly, though, the Texans are part of a larger trend in the kinds of teams that have been having enormous drop-offs in performance.

Consider the graph below. It looks at the change in DVOA for good-but-not-great teams, those that ranked between 6th and 15th in the previous year. ^[1]Before 1989, I use Andreas Shepherd’s estimated DVOA. I thank him for sharing his data.

Historically, the good-but-not-great teams have regressed a little bit. From 1985 to 2010, those teams dropped on average between two and four points of DVOA. The trend was relatively stable for each five year period. While we would expect some regression from good teams, the size of that regression has changed since 2010. Over the last four years, the good-but-not-great teams have dropped an average of ten points of DVOA, the biggest regression by far since the merger. Note that if we drop 1983 to account for regression coming out of the strike-shortened 1982 season, we get a DVOA change for 1980-1984 of about four points of DVOA, making 2010-2013 even more clearly on its own island. This idea leads into my first prediction for the season. [continue reading…]

After 214 days off, we finally have real football again. Tonight, the Seahawks host the Packers, as Seattle begins its title defense.

Starting in 2004, the NFL now schedules the defending Super Bowl champion to take the field for the league’s opening night kickoff game.  For the first eight seasons, the defending champion hosted each of these Thursday night games, and won all eight times.  In 2012, the Giants lost the opening game to the Cowboys on a Wednesday night, as  President Barack Obama was speaking the following night at the Democratic National Convention.  And last year, a conflict with the Baltimore Orioles led to the Ravens/Broncos matchup moving to Denver, which the Broncos won, 49-27.

So the last two years, the defending champs have lost, although it’s worth noting that the Ravens were a 7.5-point underdog in 2013. Tonight, Seattle is a 6-point favorite, which has become the new norm for the team.  But it wasn’t that long ago that the Seahawks were far from a lock to win every home game.

In each of Russell Wilson’s first three home starts — against the Cowboys, Packers, and Patriots — the Seahawks were three-to-four point underdogs.  And, with an assist from the replacement referees, the Seahawks won each of those games.  For his career, Wilson is 17-1 in Seahawks home games, including a 2-0 mark in the playoffs (the one loss came to Arizona, in the last regular season game in Seattle).

That makes Wilson the fourth quarterback to win 17 of his first 18 starts, joining Daryle Lamonica, Kurt Warner, and Matt Ryan. But did you know that Danny White began his career as the Cowboys starter with 18 consecutive home wins (including playoffs)?

And now, before we kick off the season, I wanted to get in my 2014 projected award winners. [continue reading…]