Month: September 2018

With the 2018 NFL season underway, I decided to release some work on my first NFL project: a team rating and prediction system.

Go to Ratings

Go to Weekly Picks

Motivating this project was a simple question.  How much should we adjust our thinking about a team based on the result of 1 game?  This has always been a question which has intrigued me.

We go into a new football season with some general expectations of the ability level of each team.  Many of our expectations come from their past performance, but some new information is also added with offseason signings, trades, injuries, etc…  Of course, there is a lot of uncertainty surrounding each team.

Then we witness week 1!  Some teams look like underrated breakout candidates, and others flop.  Hot takes abound.  But how much information can 1 game really give us?

How The Rating System Works

Continue reading “Threes and Layups NFL Team Ratings, Explained”

Though the NBA regular season is still 43 days away, it’s never too early to take a look at regular season win total over/unders! 

Rather than building a projection system and delving into whether specific teams are more likely to go over or under, I instead decided to determine whether or not five key predictors could in any way help us make predictions in general.  I will introduce the specific predictors in the next section.

To conduct my analysis, I looked at the over-under lines for all teams over the past six regular seasons.  I was able to find a combination of lines from Bovada and the Westgate SuperBook, using the articles cited in the reference section.  The dates for these lines ranged from October 5th to October 18, so they generally were recorded a week or two before the start of the regular season.  All other information used in this article, mainly the statistics used to calculate my predictors, came from basketball-reference.com.

Continue reading “Which Types of NBA Teams are the Best Win Total Over/Under Bets?”