This is a boring football post - you have been warned

So I'm bored and working on next week's football pool.  I'm trying a more systematic approach this week and want to write it down in case it works.

The pool I'm in is a straight pick the winner so I don't need to worry about point spreads or any of that fantasy football crap.  Don't even start with me about fantasy football.  The complication is that I have to rate my picks based on my confidence.  High confidence scores high points, most points win.  So I'm trying to find a system that gives me an indication of who will win AND some way of differentiating among the games.  Here's what I do:

First I use the Brother Guy quantifiers of home field advantage and better quarterback.  (These are named for their creator, my brother Guy).  Home field is easy.  Better QB can be tricky.  New England vs New York Jets is pretty easy but how do you choose between say KC's Matt Cassel and Indianapolis's Curtis Painter?  Neither of them have been very good.  Or worse yet what do you do about Matt Hasselbeck of Tennessee who is having a career year so far vs Pittsburgh's Ben Rothlisberger who is historically better but not this season?  So I'm using QB rating for it.  It's not a perfect metric but it's a standard one.

Then I go with points scored as an offensive metric and points allowed as a defensive one.  Since I'm only concerned about winning it's points, points and points.  Then I look at Take away/Give away differential.  Finally just as a way to try and deal with overall performance I use ESPN's Power Ranking.  If the difference in position on any of these is more than 5 places they score a full point, less than five is a half point, a difference of only one is a push.  That's totally arbitrary.  So max points is 6.

So this week here's my pool.  Number in the left column is my confidence points, points on the right are the ratings from my system.

13 Detroit 6
12 NY Giants 5.5
11 Green Bay 5
10 New England 5
9 Tennessee 5*
8 Buffalo 5 *
7 San Diego 4.5
6 Cincinnati 4
7 San Francisco 44 Houston 3.5
3 New Orleans 3.5
2 Indianapolis 3
1 Arizona 1.5

Yeah the Arizona-Minnesota game scores out as majorly ugly.  Virtually everything is a push.

*It breaks my heart to pick Tennessee but they are out performing my beloved Steelers on offense, defense, turnovers and at the moment I think Hasselbeck is better than a gimpy Big Ben.  Meanwhile Buffalo is the major gulp inducer of the week.  Right now they are on top on offense, take aways, home field and yes, quarterback.  Fitz has performed a lot better than Vick.  Both teams have serious defensive issues so who knows but a 8 point pick is making me sweat.  We'll see how the system performs.  Ties were decided by several things.  Teams that scored both of the Brother Guy factors were given the edge.  Otherwise I just tried to look who seemed to have the more impressive set of scores.

We'll see.

Of course if it turns out this is a winning formula I'll probably regret posting all the details here.