“Pulse of the Pickers” Explanation
As those of you who have already read my NFL 2009 Week Seven Picks are aware, I am introducing a new form of research to my picks beginning this week. I call this research aggregator Pulse of the Pickers and it serves as a single percentage reflecting how a particular game is being predicted based on fans, computer simulations, and expert game pickers from various media outlets.
To give a little bit more of an insight into how this research works, click below and follow a step-by-step breakdown.
For this example, we’re going to use the Falcons-Cowboys match-up from this week’s slate of games, as it was the most hotly-contested pick of the week.
In order to compute the Pulse of the Pickers, I rely on 21 different data inputs to calculate the overall percentage.
1. The first input comes from the Favorite (Fan Picks) line of my write-ups, which is the opinion of the fans using ESPN.com’s Pigskin Pick ‘Em game. The overall majority team picked by these users can be found on the ESPN NFL Picks and Predictions on the far right. Since the majority for this game was fans picking the Falcons to win, the Falcons get one point.
2. The second input comes from the Favorite (ESPN.com Simulation) line, which is the ESPN Accuscore Game Forecast. This can be a little tricky, however. For the Falcons-Cowboys game, if you go to the game’s intel report, you will see that the Cowboys are winning 65% of simulations. However, if you look at the NFL Picks and Predictions page from above, the pick for Accuscore is the Falcons. Because I’m assuming that the game’s intel report is the actual Accuscore prediction, this goes to the Cowboys and the points are evened up, 1-1.
3. The third input comes from the Favorite (WhatIfSports.com Simulation), which is the WhatIfSports.com simulation prediction. As you can tell from the Week 7 Picks Page, the Cowboys win 51.3% of simulations. This gives the Cowboys another point and a 2-1 lead.
4. The next input comes from the Madden 2010 Simulation line, which is the result of ESPN’s Video Games page running each of the week’s games in CPU vs. CPU format in Madden 2010. According to the simulations, the Falcons win 27-14, tying the score again at 2 points each.
5-12. The next inputs from from the ESPN Pro Picks line, data gathered from ESPN NFL Picks and Predictions page, this time taking the game predictions of their experts. We can see that the Falcons were picked by 5 experts (Allen, Golic, Hoge, Jaworski, and Schlereth) which brings the score to 7-2 for Atlanta. The Cowboys were picked by 3 experts (Mortensen, Schefter, and Wickersham) to bring the score to 7-5 Atlanta.
13-18. The next inputs are from the FOX Sports Pro Picks line, gathered from Week 7 Expert Picks at FOXSports.com, taking the predictions of their experts. The Falcons were picked by 3 experts (Glazer, Marvez, and Schein) and the Cowboys were picked by 3 experts (Czarnecki, Schrager, and Hasenmayer), bringing the score to 10-8 Atlanta.
19-21. The final inputs are from the new NFL.com Pro Picks line, gathered from NFL.com Playbook Picks. Theismann gave the Falcons a pick while Baldinger and Sharpe picked the Cowboys, leading to a final score of 11-10 Atlanta.
The next step at this point is to take the higher number and divide it by the total number of pick inputs, 21. In this case, Atlanta’s 11 points get divided into 21 to get a percentage of 52%. This means, based on these 21 inputs, the Falcons have been picked slightly more often, 52% of the time.
Since I am primarily a writer and not a mathematician, I’m not going to go through the trouble of weighting different picks based on the expertise of the picker or the reliability of the simulation, so this isn’t a useful aggregator as far as that is concerned. This does, however, give a percentage to the overall opinion among fans, simulations, and experts as to how the particular game is going to play out. It will be interesting to see, once Week Seven is complete, how the results matched up in relation to the picking percentages I’ve reported through the Pulse of the Pickers.
Side note: I found one new source of picks today, but too late to incorporate into my Week Seven picks. Starting with Week Eight, I will be incorporating the ESPN Sunday Countdown picks from Mike Ditka, Keyshawn Johnson, Cris Carter, and Tom Jackson. For those interested in their Week Seven picks, here’s a breakdown:
Green Bay @ Cleveland: 4 for Packers.
San Diego @ Kansas City: 2 for Chargers, 2 for Chiefs.
Indianapolis @ St. Louis: 4 for Colts
Minnesota @ Pittsburgh: 1 for Vikings, 3 for Steelers
New England @ Tampa Bay: 4 for Patriots
San Francisco @ Houston: 4 for Texans
Buffalo @ Carolina: 2 for Bills, 2 for Panthers
NY Jets @ Oakland: 2 for Jets, 2 for Raiders
Atlanta @ Dallas: 2 for Falcons, 2 for Cowboys
Chicago @ Cincinnati: 2 for Bears, 2 for Bengals
New Orleans @ Miami: 1 for Saints, 3 for Dolphins
Arizona @ NY Giants: 4 for Giants
Philadelphia @ Washington: 4 for Eagles
As you can see, many of the picks for this week go along with the other sources already factored in my picks or wouldn’t have an effect (equal number picks), except for the Saints-Dolphins game; this is the only source so far that has the Dolphins as a favorite within the circle of picks.
Hope this is gives you readers a better idea of what this whole Pulse of the Pickers is all about, and I look forward to the results after this weekend’s games are concluded.
Tags: NFL, game picks, NFL games, ESPN, ESPN.com, FoxSports, FoxSports.com, research, football, Eric Allen, Mike Golic, Merrill Hoge, Ron Jaworski, Chris Mortensen, Adam Schefter, Mark Schlereth, Seth Wickersham, Jay Glazer, Alex Marvez, John Czarnecki, Adam Schein, Peter Schrager, Adrian Hasenmeyer, Brian's NFL Pick 'Em, NFL 2009, ESPN Pigskin Pick 'Em, Pigskin Pick 'Em, Mike Ditka, Keyshawn Johnson, Cris Carter, Tom Jackson, NFL Sunday Countdown
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