Dr Z's NFL Guidebook

The following sections are included:

• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface

What makes football interesting?

The main reason it is a very good game of strategy that’s fun to watch and bet on. So much happens so fast. We now discuss some of the components of the game.

What is now the NFL was established in 1920 as the American Professional Association with ten teams from four states. Jim Thorpe, one of the most famous athletes of all time, was president. It became the NFL in 1922. The Chicago Bears and the Arizona Cardinals can trace their roots back to two of the original ten teams. The Green Bay Packers is the oldest NFL team which has had the same name and location since joining the NFL in 1921.

The following sections are included:

• Introduction
• The greatest teams, coaches and players at various positions
• Number of Top 400 players by Team in 2017 by Sports Illustrated
• Some of the greatest coaches
• The 100 greatest current players
• NFL Top 100
• Comparison of Sports Illustrated and NFL Rankings
• Modeling the Dependence of Team Win percentage on Top Players
• Number of Top Players from Sports Illustrated
• Weighting by Position — Top 100 from NFL Ranking
• Team Performance: Predicted and Actual
• Model Predictions
• The Sports Illustrated List — top 100
• Conclusion

In this chapter we discuss a number of interesting ideas including some from the class notes of our late colleague Tom Cover, a Professor of Statistics and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. Tom took ill and died at the age of 73 in 2016. He taught a course in Sports Statistics and interested numerous students in the topic. Analytics is popular in today’s sports analysis, and Tom was ahead of his time in bringing mathematics and statistics to decision making in sports.

The following sections are included:

• The Swetye Elo Method: which team will win a given football game?
• The Swetye Elo Power Ratings for NFL teams
• The 538 Elo Power Ratings for NFL teams
• An example was the 2008 Super Bowl
• An educated guess that paid off
• Elo ratings and the probability of winning
• Evaluating the Elo Ratings

You can hedge bets as the odds change based on the current score and field position. My experience is that the sports betting market is more efficient than the financial markets, so therefore harder to beat. Of course, die hard efficient market types will like to forget that efficient markets has taken a severe beating in the 1987 and 2007-2009 stock market crashes. They simply cannot explain these events, nor the consistent high returns of some superior investors.

The following sections are included:

• How the playoffs work
• The 2010 NFL Super Bowl
• Super Bowl Playoff Ratings

The following section is included:

• The playoffs

The following sections are included:

• Week 9, 2011–2012 season
• Week 12, 2011–2012 season
• Week 13: Games and predictions
• Summary week 12
• The Playoffs
• Modified thoughts of Jason Cole in yahoosports.com
• Conclusion
• The February 5, 2012 Super Bowl in Indianapolis
• Recap of the Super Bowl
• Recap of the Playoffs
• New Orleans at San Francisco: a game for the ages for risk arbitrage bettors
• New York Giants at Green Bay
• Pittsburgh at Denver: which Tebow will show up?
• Denver at New England: a learning experience for Tebow to watch the great Brady

In this chapter we trace the NFL playoffs leading to the 2013 super bowl on February 3rd in the New Orleans super dome. By tracing bets I made on Betfair, I hope to illustrate some general investment ideas and their use. These US football markets, which trade continuously on Betfair, have considerable mean reversion in scores and field position that gets quickly translated into odds. Hence there is risk arbitrage that helps you win the bets even if the team you start betting on actually loses the game. The goal is to make bets so that no matter which team wins, you make a profit. That means that (US odds on A)(US odds on B)>1 or (UK odds- -1 on A)(UK odds -1 on B)>1.

We take this up after week 16 in late December 2013 and finish on February 2, 2014 after the Super Bowl. There was one more week to play and then each team will have played 16 games with one week off. Some observations.

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…

I took this up after eleven weeks play of the 17 weeks with 10 or 11 games played by each of the 32 teams. There have been many interesting developments.

The year started off with the NFL commissioner Roger Goodell (who is paid a reputed $35 million/year by the owners) enforcing the four game suspension of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady. The claim, called deflategate was cheating by using slightly underinflated footballs. Since other top quarterbacks like Aaron Rodgers and Drew Brees pointed out that different quarterbacks preferred different types of footballs, all this plus the fact that New England won the disputed game against Indianapolis by a huge margin, to me was nonsense and a great distraction from the game. It was likely Goodell in a power play.

There are many forecasters including ourselves. The assumption is wide-spread that the New England Patriots will be dominant again and the Super Bowl 51 loser, the Atlanta Falcons, will not be as good this coming season and possibly not even make the playoffs. It is hard to repeat as Super Bowl but there have been two-peats but no three-peats. The Super Bowl loser usually does much worse. The following are Sports Illustrated forecasts made before the regular season by Andy Benoit for the season records, wild cards, divisional rounds, championship games in the AFC and NFC and Super Bowl 52 on February 4, 2018 at the US Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In the post season, it lists the six teams in each conference he expects to be in the playoffs along with their seeds from 1 to 6, This comes from the four divisions of each conference with the teams ranked by their regular season record.

The following sections are included:

• The Playoff Picture
• Conference Championships

The following sections are included:

• Win Probability in Games
• Competitor Ratings — the ELO system
• FiveThirtyEight ELO NFL Ratings
• Point Spread
• Testing the ELO Each Week
• Conclusion

It is customary, after the regular season ends, to determine the MVP and other awards and to fire and hire new coaches and assistants and for players to change teams through free agency and other maneuvers. We start this chapter with the awards for the previous season. First there is the forecast of the winners and then a list of the actual winners. The rest of the chapter discusses coaches and players, free agencies, injuries, and the preseason draft plus the 25 greatest players for 2018-2019 season. We also do a case study of the Seattle Seahawks after the famous interception on the one yard line in Super Bowl 49.

The following sections are included:

• References
• Index