Just Take The Favorites: 2004 Expert Picks Results

For the past seventeen weeks of this NFL season I have been following the picks of 54 different people and two computer games (see my zipped excel file), though I’d like to note that the two computer games apparently didn’t pick for three of the seventeen weeks unfortunately.  Picks were made by celebrities, ranging from celebrities from the stage to the mother of a sports celebrity.  I think that only the people living in Philadelphia consider Wilma McNabb a celebrity.  After seventeen weeks I have learned the following things:

1) Never trust people who call themselves experts (ESPN pickers are now known as “analysts” when in previous years they were known as “experts”…it goes to show how much they know)

These people who call themselves experts only seem to do well in the weeks when the games are so easy to pick (see week 11, when the average number of games picked correctly was a high of 12.347).  Most of the weeks these people pick are either average or just above average.  Unfortuantely in these days of parity in the NFL, unless you can read the minds of the players and can forsee a mental breakdown by a team, predicting games in the NFL is terribly difficult, and no one is an expert.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know the Eagles will pound their NFC East foes.  It’s a no-brainer that the Patriots will do the same to their AFC East counterparts.  Ditto for the Colts and the Steelers following week 3 of the season.  But it trully takes an expert to see that the Browns and the Bears would upset the Ravens and Packers in weeks 1 and 2 respectively.

2) ESPN Insider is a waste of money (I don’t pay for it, I use a friend’s account).

If you notice the first column the excel file I put out every week, I made note of every pick ESPN Insider made.  Every week they put out an in-depth analysis of every game, analyzing everything from the tendencies of each team to how often the Quarterback will look at the playbook cheat sheet he has taped to his arm.  Luckily Donovan McNabb doesn’t have one of those, so I don’t have to worry about anouncers ridiculing him about that.  After about a few weeks of reading the analyses, I gave up because everything they said would happen either never happened or the exact opposite happened.  As far as their picking abilities went, 60.5% was below the average for everyone.  60.5% isn’t really an incentive to buy into their Insider picks.  If it was 70% or higher then maybe I would be compelled to actually pay for their service.

3) Celebrities who have no affiliation with the NFL or have any interest in it can pick pretty well.

The middle 12 columns featured celebrity picks.  At first I said to myself “which fool thought of this dumb idea…someone should be fired for this!”  Even today I still think that starting that stupid Page 3 was a mistake.  Heres a prediction: There will be an ESPN Page 4.  But anyway, the picking actually turned out to be quite a success.  Six of the 12 celebrities pulled 160 correct picks, which is quite amazing.  The rest pulled better than 150 which is still quite decent.  The only problem I saw was that celebrities aren’t “unbiased” pickers.  I put “unbiased” in quotes because while Ron Jaworski and Merril Hoge are supposed to be unbiased, they still have a bias towards the Eagles and Steelers respectively, and Hoge has his hatred of the Eagles of course.  While their love affairs with these teams dont really affect their picks for these teams, Hoge’s hatred of the Eagles did alter his picks, up until they clinched the East of course (when he wrote his article about how he was sorry for doubting the Eagles).  Anyway, some of the celebrities had their biases, which definitely showed in their picks.  Not that its a big deal, but it had an effect on their final stats.  The Lachey brothers are Bengals fans, Lil Bow Wow is a Falcons fan, Andy Roddick is a Giants fan, Holly Robinson Peete is a Panthers fan because her husband is on the team, ditto for Heather Mitts and AJ Feeley of the Dolphins and the same goes for Wilma McNabb and Eagles QB Donovan McNabb.  But man, James Blake can really pick NFL games.  Until the end of the season, when he started to be come a little more ordinary, week in week out he would have, on average, a 10 game lead on everyone else; quite impressive.

4) The computer games Madden NFL 2005 and ESPN NFL 2005 need some reworking.

The fact that Madden NFL 2005 and ESPN NFL 2005 pulled close to 50% for the season when the average was 60% is indication enough that these programs need some roster tweaking. (Mind I note that a difference of 10% is 25 correct games)

5) If you played the line in every game for the season you would be damn lucky to pull 50% of the games correct.

Amazingly picking the favorites week in week out will result in a 66% success rate, striaght up mind I note.  Against the spread the favoites didn’t seem to yield such wonderful results having only a 48% success rate.

Consider the following:
The average success rate among the people picking the games against the spread is 50.3%.

This basically means that unless you are picking an Eagles game which actually has some kind of meaning which is against an NFC opponent, just take a quarter out of your pocket and flip it and take your pick based on that.

If you read Bill Simmons archive over at ESPN Page 2, he has some ridiculous stat for the Eagles, Patriots, Steelers, Colts, and Chargers, that was only relevant during the time when these teams were playing meaningful games, or games not against one another.  He was tracking how these teams stacked up against the spread…and it was close to 100% of the time they covered, no joke.  The rest of the NFL is so mediocre that picking just these teams week in week out would have netted you some profit, some serious profit.  The oddsmakers must have been really upset with these teams…

6) Picking the favorites straight up nets you second place among people who pick for sports websites…better than ESPN, Yahoo, CNNSI, etc.

Straight up, the favorites were good picks.  Yeah you had your upsets every week, but if you were looking to win an office pool (which I wasn’t trying to do at all) just throw out all your silly “feelings” about games, throw out all that nonsense ESPN puts into you on all their NFL programs, and just take the favorites.  Hell, you are guaranteed to beat everyone who picks the NFL games on sports websites…cough cough cough…

And finally…
7) Harmon Forecast is the biggest crock of crap out there in the sports world.  

If you visit the site he makes his picks over at CBS Sportsline’s NFL site it says:

The Harmon Football Forecast is one of the most highly regarded and widely read sports features in the country, published in over 200 newspapers.

It all began when Bob Harmon began predicting college and NFL games in 1957. He devised a mathematical formula that picked winners correctly between 72 and 78 percent of the time; most seasons getting almost 75 percent of his picks right.

Today, Jim Harmon and his staff are the only forecasters who predict exact scores and chart every college and pro team.

Between 72% and 78% eh?  Not even close.  Now considering that the CBS picks are always noted to be against the spread I figured he would pick this well against the spread…fat chance.  He not only failed to pull 70%, he failed to break even.  Then I figured that he was referring to his picks straight up since he does list them.   Well, he pulled up approximately 25 games short…better luck next year I say.  Don’t expect it though.  Though I didn’t do track picks for NFL picks last year, NFL.com’s newest writer Gregg Easterbrook followed Harmon’s Picks last year and he also noted the fact that Harmon failed to pick 70% correct for 2003’s games.  I think that we should start an online petition at that site that offers it to force him to remove that line that says he picks 70% of games correctly.

Anyway, I hope you all enjoyed the regular season picks as much as I enjoyed doing them.  It is so much easier to see everyones picks on one page then having to visit 20 individual pages for them.

For those people reading who are in the file, good luck with your playoff picks…I’ll be tracking those as well!

New Years Resolutions for tracking NFL Picks:
Get cooler logos (those that are used in the file come from ESPN and are so bland).
Add Jay Novacek’s picks over at MSNBC.
Use the scores people predict when picking straight up and translate them into picks against the spread.
And for me, pick more favorites!

Happy Holidays!