January 5th, 2008
Posted by G. W. Newton at 11:41 am in NFL | No Comments
As I mentioned in my previous article. It doesn’t require the wisdom of Solomon to pick the winners this weekend. The last statistics I saw, it was somewhere around 75-80% of the favorites win in the first round of the NFL playoffs. That’s because most of the time they are also the home team and usually the higher seeded team. So basically I could just go with the favorites and probably end up 3 out of 4.
I looked in the paper and saw that Tampa Bay is favored by 3 over the Giants and the point total is expected to be 39 (businessmen’s numbers). So the first thing we do is hold a little algebra class. TB + NYG = 39 and TB = NYG + 2 then 39 = 2(NYG) + 3 and thus the “experts” are telling us NYG will score about 18 points. This of course also means TB will score about 21 so the experts are predicting say Bucs 21 Giants 18.
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January 5th, 2008
Posted by G. W. Newton at 11:29 am in NFL | Comment (1)
It doesn’t require the wisdom of Solomon to pick the winners this weekend. The last statistics I saw, it was somewhere around 75-80% of the favorites win in the first round of the NFL playoffs. That’s because most of the time they are also the home team and usually the higher seeded team. So basically I could just go with the favorites and probably end up with 3 out of 4 right.
To bring it back to more of a 50-50 chance I will consider the point spread. Statistics still say I should get at least one right. Think about it this way. Suppose you are going to flip a coin 4 times and count the number of heads you get. Mathematics says that the odds of getting all tails are (1/2)4 (1/2)0 or 1/16. So figuring that considering the spread brings my odds down to about 50-50, ( the same as flipping a coin) this means I could expect to pick all losers in the opening round of the playoffs only once in 16 years. But our odds are much better than 50/50 because we have our wits about us
I looked in the paper and saw that San Diego is favored by 9 over the Titans and the point total is expected to be 40. But don’t forget, those are “businessmen’s numbers”. Those numbers are about making money and not really about football. So the first thing we do is hold a little algebra class. SD + Tenn = 40 and SD = Tenn + 9 then 39 = 2(Tenn) + 9 and thus the experts are telling us Titans will score about 15 points. This of course also means San Diego will score about 24 so the experts are predicting say San Diego 24 Tennessee 15.
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