Some Blog Site

I know I said I wouldn’t have any more football posts for a while, but I forgot about the release of the 2011 NFL schedule. And between now and the start of the season, I may go back and analyze previous seasons to get more samples of prediction methods.

In the last week or two, we had the NFL draft and the announcement of the 2011 schedule. Now that we know who will play whom and when (that is, if the NFL and players get their act together and resume football as we knew it), we can start predicting wins and losses.

I keep my predictions over at Some Fun Site. During the course of 2010, I saw that predictions based on the previous season’s results were just as good as predictions that updated themselves week-by-week. View results of previous football seasons.

2010 Summary

Last year, I predicted that

• Arizona = 12-4
• Carolina = 7-9
• Chicago = 5-11
• Cleveland = 2-14
• Detroit = 1-15
• New Orleans = 16-0
• Pittsburgh = 11-5
• San Diego = 15-1
• St. Louis = 0-16
• Tampa Bay = 2-14

How they actually did was

• Arizona = 5 -11
• Carolina = 2 -14
• Chicago = 11-5
• Cleveland = 5 -11
• Detroit = 6 -10
• New Orleans = 11-5
• Pittsburgh = 12-4
• San Diego = 9 -7
• St. Louis = 7 -9
• Tampa Bay = 10-6

Only one of those was close. So much for the consensus picks…

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