Site Update: New TR Pick Logic, 30+ New Football Stats, New Football “Likely Score”, and Earlier Pick Freezing

September 27, 2011 - by David Hess

It’s been a month since we released a notable update to the site, mostly because we were focused on polishing The Predictor. But over the past few weeks we’ve made quite a few changes that should add a lot of value to the site. Check out this list of great new features.

Improved Logic for Official TR Picks

In the past, the logic behind our official TR Picks essentially just copied the pick of whichever model was most reliable in the situation at hand. Starting this week, for NFL and college football, we have a new, smarter algorithm for Game Winner, ATS, Money Line, and Over-Under picks:

– NFL point spread picks
– NFL over under picks
– NFL money line picks
– NFL game winner picks
– College football point spread picks
– College football over under picks
– College football money line picks
– College football game winner picks

We analyzed our historical pick accuracy data to figure out the optimal combination of the predictions of our various models. Now most picks will be a weighted average of multiple models.

Previously, if the Decision Tree model projected 50.1% odds for a team, but the other models both heavily favored the opponent, there was a good chance our logic would still side with the Decision Tree, despite that model basically labeling the game as a toss up. With the new logic, the more confident models will get a bit more weight, and can “out-vote” the less confident model.

Along the same lines, sometimes one model can be overly confident in a pick. If the other two have more conservative predictions, those will dampen the impact of the one outlier. Finally, if the models agree, there may be a synergistic effect, where our official confidence is higher than the confidence of any single model.

Just like trying to predict an election by asking one person who they’ll vote for is silly, but asking a million people can get you a great prediction, combining our models leads to a smarter prediction that listening to any single one.

More Information: New “Odds” & “Value” Columns on Pick Pages

Related to our new pick logic, we’ve added an “Odds” column (or “Value” for money line picks) to our pick detail pages:

In the past, we’ve summarized how strong we think each official TR Pick is by rating it on a scale of 1 to 5 stars. As a refresher, for ATS, totals, and money line picks, 1 star means a slight lean where we have no confidence the picks will be profitable, 2 stars means we think the picks should at least break-even long term, and 3 stars means we expect at least a 54-55% long term win rate.

Don’t worry, we’re leaving those stars alone; they’ll still be shown on all the picks pages. But we’ve decided to also start displaying the actual projected win odds that we use to come up with that star rating.

We figure more info is always better. After all, as in the screen image above, often there’s less difference between the worst three star pick and the best two star pick than there is between the best and worst three star picks. You deserve to know that.

30+ New Football Stats

We’ve added a plethora of new statistics to our NFL and college football team stat sections. Some of these were requested by users, and others we just thought would be interesting to some of you. Here’s a partial list, but be sure to explore our NFL team stats and college football team stats for more. All of these stats are available not just for this year, but also going back to 2003.

A sampling of our new NFL stats:

And a few of the college football stats we’ve added:

“Likely Score” Added to Football Matchup Pages

For a while now, we’ve published the predicted final score from our Similar Games model. Those are created by looking at the historical games most similar to the one we want to predict, and computing a weighted average of the final scores.

Those predicted scores are valuable information, but one thing that bugged us was that if you just round the scores to the nearest whole number, sometimes the result doesn’t look like a very common football score. So, we created a way to map those predicted scores to more common ones.

Now, on football game matchup pages, we’re displaying both the exact Similar Games prediction, and the new Likely Score:

If you’re trying to guess the exact score of a game — like for a tiebreaker on a pick’em contest — we’d recommend using the new Likely Score. If you’re just looking for a predicted average margin of victory, the old Similar Game Final Score Projection is still your best bet.

Now Freezing Picks Earlier

Lastly, a minor technical note.

We update our site continuously throughout the day, grabbing the latest odds and game results from our data providers, and updating site pages and predictions accordingly. (A betting line movement, for example, will often change our predictions for a game.)

It often takes an hour or two for our site update scripts to do one of these cycles. To ensure that no predictions appear to “change” on the site after a game begins, we are now freezing all of our game winner and betting picks 2 hours before game time.

(Note that you may still see predictions change on the site closer to game time than 2 hours, but as mentioned above, that’s because of our site update cycles; it can take extra time for a new prediction calculated in our database to make its way onto the site.)