Chapter 12: The 2014-2015 Season, Playoffs and the Super Bowl

I take this up going into the 15th of the 17 week season. In the past John Swetye has helped me by computing the Elo ratings. We now have another independent source — Nate Silver, a superstar predictor’s website www.fivethirtyeight.com and his 2012 book The Signal and the Noise. Nate has a terrific record of predicting all sorts of events — political, sports and other areas. His Elo ratings are different from John’s using the formulas we discuss in chapter 5 which begin with each teams preseason standing from the previous year. For example, Seattle, last year’s Super Bowl winner, started at #1, fell to #3 and now are back at #1 tied with New England. John’s was just based on the current season’s results so this is possibly an improvement…