02-11-2022, 05:39 PM
(02-11-2022, 05:00 PM)leonardfan40 Wrote: Who’s to say the Rams are better? More talented roster maybe, but better right now? Which team is PLAYING better right now? How does each teams rhythm factor in? What about confidence? What about nerves of each individual? What about their coaches schemes lately vs early in the season? What about players and coaches effort? What about extra time to prepare and heal? What about situational play calling right now for the last month vs the whole year? Teams are constantly evolving and growing. People are constantly growing and learning. Using a flawed model based on an already short season that can’t factor in all the nuances of the game is meaningless.
Must be a cakewalk getting paid to put meaningless percentages on games . I can do that too! Bengals have a 99% chance of winning vs Rams 1%. If Rams win I’m not wrong, my model isn’t wrong, the Rams just hit on that 1%
In the real world the bengals have a 50/50 shot no matter what a bunch of math nerds say. These percentages mean absolutely nothing. You don’t have to win 100,000 games/simulations. It’s one game. If they played 100,000 times in real life maybe the 32% would mean something and be remotely close. No way of knowing though so it doesn’t matter. It’s one game with two possible outcomes. Neither team gets to start with more points or more players on the field.
I'm not sure if this is your intention, but these conversations always go down a road where it becomes condescending and it becomes rather frustrating.
What says the Rams are better is their on-field performance - that's how you judge a team. Probably the top statistic used is EPA per play. You can derive a teams expected points scored by taking their field position and various other factors. It's an efficiency metric and is used to figure out which teams are using their limited resources (I.E. downs) better. You can use this to figure out who is better over the course of a season or within any given time frame. Various models may use various metrics, but EPA is the golden standard within the analytics community. All of the situations you mentioned can be accounted for in some way. There are programs that can watch game film and break down what coverage the defense is running and provide plays to counter it based on success rate, break down tendencies etc.
I'm not sure what to say regarding this point. Again, that just isn't how it works. If you think it is easy and meaningless, I guess go work for an NFL team in their analytics department lol. In all seriousness, no NFL team is going to have a 99% chance of victory against another NFL team. Maybe if a team was favored by 20 points, I guess. Most WP models account for the Vegas spread, because it is fairly accurate. If a model is just consistently wrong, then the model is probably bad. However, if the model has a strong correlation to victories, then it is a good model (again, the Vegas spread is pretty good).
And these conversations usually end up with something along the lines of "math nerd" or "data nerd" or some other variation of nerd thrown around. It isn't very creative. I'm not going to engage this part - you're pretty dug into your stance. So, one team will win this weekend and I hope it is Cincinnati. WHO-DEY!
