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.

Ah football season again

I'm back playing the football pool organized by Aran Walter and the youth community at St. Thomas Episcopal church in Oshkosh Wisconsin.  The pool is called STYGNFLPEC which stands for Saint Thomas Youth Group National Football League something P, something E, something C.  I honestly don't remember.  It's a fun pool just for the bragging rights.

The concept seems easy enough.  Pick the straight up winner of each week's game and then assign a point value to it.  The idea is you assign the highest value to the game you're most confident in and the lowest to the one you have the least faith in.  At the end of the week's games your points are totalled up and the person with the most points at the end of the season wins.  Easy.

Yeah, right.

My goal each year is to finish in the Top 10.  My bottom standard is to finish in the top half of the entire field.  I think I've failed that bottom one once.  I don't believe I've ever finished in the Top 10.

So here we go.  Week 1.  A pretty good week.  I was let down by Cleveland (9 points), Denver (12 points) and NY Giants (14 points).  The Bengals, the Raiders and the Redskins were better out of the box than I expected.  Also missed that the Giants had as many injured.  For a first week (which is traditionally awful for me) 88 points and a 56.26% correct pick percentage was actually pretty good.  To be at the top of this poll I probably need to keep it in the 60% on picks (this weeks top player had 115 points and a 68% pick rate.  Best pick rate was 75% for places 2, 3, and 4.  Obviously they missed a bigger point game or two).  I'm #30 at the moment in  a field of 82.  So I'm OK.  As I said week 1 tends to be awful for me so I'm happy.  If Denver and the NY had come through for me I'd probably be about 10 places higher.  But that's the way it goes.

In case you wondering about why the Steelers didn't get a mention in the "let me down" list I had them as my 1 point game.  I knew that Baltimore certainly could beat them.  Beat them like a drum was NOT what I was expecting.

Next weeks games look like they'll be fun to pick as well.  Sigh.