2010 NFL Elimination Pool - Week 5 pick

4 correct picks down, only 13 to go! In week 5 I'm going with the Colts to defeat the undefeated Chiefs this week. The Colts have the largest projected margin of victory of all favorites across all Las Vegas lines this week. I also considered the Ravens to defeat the Broncos at home this week, but I want to save the Ravens for week 7 when they have the Bills at home, and the Bills are even worse than the Broncos. Plus, as I mentioned earlier, according to the Vegas moneylines, the Colts are more likely to win than the Ravens this week.

NFL Survivor/Elimination Pool - Week 4 Pick

Week 4 has a few projected blowouts on the schedule: Panthers @ Saints, Lions @ Packers, and to a slightly lesser degree 49ers @ Falcons. I've already used the Packers, so that leaves me with the Saints or Falcons. According to me, this is the Falcons easiest game until week 17 when they get the Panthers at home. But, as I've discussed before, I downweight future weeks, (b/c your pool might not last until week 17), so you can say this is the best time to use the Falcons (if you're ever going to use them).

The Saints on the other hand, have projected blowouts at home in weeks 7, 11, 14, and 17 versus the Browns, Seahawks, Rams, and Bucs respectively. My model is telling me to save the Saints for week 14 against the Rams because that is the only projected blowout on the schedule that week.

So, my model is saying to go for the Falcons in week 4, and that's what I'm going to do (here's hoping for an 0-4 49ers team). If you have very few people in your pool, and are fairly certain that it will not last until week 14, then go for the Saints.

Also, if you had rebuys in weeks 1 and/or 2 and used bad teams as winners (and still have the packers and bears available), then that changes everything as well...

NFL survivor pool - week 8 and 9 strategy

I'm heading to Hawaii tomorrow for ~2 weeks, and I'm not bringing my computer, so I'm going to discuss weeks 8 and 9 now.

In week 8 I think you should go with San Diego (vs. Oakland) or Chicago (vs. Cleveland). Both of these teams are huge favorites this week and neither team has any games remaining on their schedules worth saving them for.

In week 9, Indianapolis and New Orleans have the biggest projected blowouts on the schedule. However, the next few options are good as well and New Orleans and Indianapolis both need to be saved for future weeks when they will be the only good options. So, in week 9 I'd go with San Francisco or New England who will be playing their easiest game left on their 2009 schedules.

So, pretty simple stuff, right? I'll see you for week 10!

2009 NFL Survivor Elimination Pool - Updated Team Rankings

A few of the comments have questioned my model because it was based on ESPN's power rankings. For the first few weeks of the season, I think it was a good idea to base the optimization model on the power rankings because what else do you have to go by? It just doesn't make sense to use last year's team statistics or 2009 preseason statistics. So I went with the power rankings which told me that going into week 1 the defending Super Bowl champs Pittsburgh were the best team and the 0-16 Lions were the worst, which made a lot of sense at the time.

However, there are several areas in which using the power rankings leaves something to be desired. For example, what if two teams (such as Tampa Bay and St. Louis) are equally good or bad? Power rankings force one of them to be ranked better than the other. Also, rankings force teams to be given incremental ranks from 1 to 32, but what if the best team is twice as good as the 2nd best team? Power rankings force the model to believe that the best team is as equally likely to beat the 2nd best team as the 31st team is to beat the 32nd team.

So, 3 weeks into the season, I think it's time to incorporate some 2009 NFL team statistics into the model. So before calculating the week 4 picks, I've made a few enhancements to the model. Each team's score (which is the essential input to the model which gets updated every week) will now be calculated based on three metrics:

1. Yards gained minus yards allowed per game (Yard Differential)
2. Point differential per game
3. ESPN power rankings

I began with yard differential / game which is the yards gained per game minus the yards allowed per game. Denver (160 more yards gained than allowed per game) is the best and Cleveland (195 more yards allowed than gained per game) is the worst team at yard differential so far this season. But yard differential / game isn't everything. I wanted to incorporate turnovers and red zone offensive and defensive proficiency which is where the point per game differential comes into play. The Saints are the best team so far in point differential per game, averaging 21 more points scored than allowed through week 3.

Finally, if I would have counted point differential/game and yard differential per game equally, the Saints would have come out as the best team going into week 4. This is why the power rankings are still incorporated into the model, b/c they provide a nice grounding (The saints are now power ranked 4th btw)

So these three metrics are all indexed meaning each of the 3 metrics is re-scaled so that the best team gets a score of 100 and the worst team a score of 0. A team's final score will be their average score across the 3 metrics. Here is how the final score was calculated for all 32 teams (remember, these scores will be re-calcualted every week):

Team	Yard Differential	Point Differential	ESPN Power Rank	Yard Index	Points Index	Power Rank Index	Final Score
BAL	147.6	16.6	1	96.6	89.1	100.0	95.3
NO	125.7	21.3	4	90.4	100.0	90.3	93.6
NYG	146.4	10.7	3	96.3	75.5	93.5	88.4
IND	90.7	9	2	80.6	71.6	96.8	83.0
DEN	159.6	15.4	13	100.0	86.4	61.3	82.6
MIN	57.6	10.3	5	71.2	74.6	87.1	77.6
NE	132.7	3.3	7	92.4	58.4	80.6	77.2
PHI	121.3	7.3	9	89.2	67.7	74.2	77.0
NYJ	59.0	10.3	6	71.6	74.6	83.9	76.7
SD	60.0	3	12	71.9	57.7	64.5	64.7
DAL	47.0	8.4	17	68.2	70.2	48.4	62.3
GB	-22.7	6	10	48.5	64.7	71.0	61.4
CHI	21.7	1	14	61.1	53.1	58.1	57.4
PIT	56.7	-1	16	71.0	48.5	51.6	57.0
CIN	-29.0	1.6	11	46.8	54.5	67.7	56.3
ATL	-78.3	1.3	8	32.9	53.8	77.4	54.7
SF	-43.7	4.6	15	42.6	61.4	54.8	53.0
SEA	43.6	3	23	67.3	57.7	29.0	51.3
TEN	16.4	-4.4	18	59.6	40.6	45.2	48.5
ARI	-25.0	-3.7	19	47.9	42.3	41.9	44.0
WAS	15.6	-3	26	59.4	43.9	19.4	40.9
JAC	-49.0	-3	22	41.1	43.9	32.3	39.1
BUF	-71.7	-2.7	21	34.7	44.6	35.5	38.3
MIA	-13.7	-8.7	24	51.1	30.7	25.8	35.9
HOU	-103.0	-7	20	25.9	34.6	38.7	33.1
DET	-97.7	-9	28	27.4	30.0	12.9	23.4
CAR	-69.0	-16.7	25	35.5	12.2	22.6	23.4
OAK	-143.0	-7	27	14.6	34.6	16.1	21.8
KC	-98.0	-12.3	30	27.3	22.4	6.5	18.7
TB	-136.0	-16.6	31	16.6	12.5	3.2	10.8
STL	-127.3	-16.3	32	19.0	13.2	0.0	10.7
CLE	-194.7	-22	29	0.0	0.0	9.7	3.2

So these are the week 4 scores which will go into the model. Let me know your comments. I will share the model's week 4 picks sometime tomorrow.