NFL Analytics for 2021 Season

[KillerGoose]

(11-04-2021, 10:14 PM)KillerGoose Wrote:

Week 8 Pythag Record

Not much to say here. Cincinnati is still tracking for an 11 win season at this current pace. Cleveland is on pace for a 9 win season. I did some studying into this and by my findings, with week eight data, this Pythagorean projection is off by an average of two games. So, take this as a prediction of +-2. This means that Cincinnati is predicted to fall in the 9-13 win range. We'll see how accurate that becomes.

Earlier in the season, I ran this analytics thread. I wanted to re-visit it specifically to see how my record projections have ended up looking. The results were really encouraging. To eliminate decimals, I rounded these values to the nearest whole number and then compared them to the actual records as of today. Here are the results (incomplete data because the week isn't over, nor the season, I know).

Records perfectly predicted so far  - 5

Records predicted within one game - 17

Records predicted within two games - 24

Most egregious prediction - Bills at 15 wins (-5 delta, 10-6 current record)

Records predicted perfectly - (Rams, Bucs, Colts, Raiders, Eagles)

So, using this formula, we were able to predict 53% of the leagues record to within one game and 75% of the leagues record to within two games by using week eight data. It felt shaky as we were going through the season, because each week the formula was saying that Cincinnati was on pace for either 11 or 10 wins and I was still skeptical. Now, here we are sitting at 10 wins with one game left to go. Some of these numbers are going to change because of next week but still, pretty impressive hit rate for using mid-season data. Thought it would be interesting to review this now that we are very close to the end.