Notes from the Sports Nerds

3 Football Prediction Tools Are Better Than 1

• 4 comments - College Football, NFL - posted by tom on 09.30.09

As one of the final steps in rolling out our new user-driven NFL prediction tools and college football prediction tools, we decided that it would simplify the experience for users if we released several distinct products.

There are many different use cases for football predictions. Some people are in pick’em contests where they need to predict straight-up game winners, while others are in point spread based pools. Some are in pools in which they assign confidence points to every pick, while others aren’t.

On the betting side, some people only bet point spreads, others only totals, and some a little of both.

As we thought about how to design our latest tools (which allow you to build customized, data driven prediction systems and use those systems to predict the upcoming week’s games), we were having trouble, as is often the case, figuring out how to fit lots of information on one screen — and still have the tool be simple enough for a first time user to understand.

(That’s the ultimate irony of our site, by the way. With so much nerdy math going on behind the scenes, our biggest challenge is often figuring out how to create an interface that lets users take advantage of all that math power without overwhelming them with complexity and numbers.)

In the end, we remembered the old adage: if you try to serve too many masters, you’ll please none.

The result was that we released not one but three weekly prediction tools: Win Predictor, ATS (Against The point Spread) Predictor, and Over/Under Predictor. If you need to make picks, we hope it’s clear which tool you should use, based on the type of pick’em pool you’re in or type of bets you like to make.

Here are links to all the tools. Give them a whirl and let us know what you think:

NFL Win Predictor
NFL ATS Predictor
NFL Over/Under Predictor

College Football Win Predictor
College Football ATS Predictor
College Football Over/Under Predictor