NFL 2015 Week 3 Predictions

Week 2 is in the books and Amos had a great week. Sort of.

For those just joining, Amos is a statistical model created to predict the outcomes of each NFL game. Amos currently predicts games straight-up. Additionally, Amos then predicts the remainder of the season to compute the ending record of each team.

Amos also has peers within the NFL prediction field. While there are a number of sources for game predictions, I have identified Microsoft’s Bing Prediction, ESPN’s Football Power Index (FPI) and Nate Silver’s Elo as benchmarks for comparison to Amos.

Bing has now fallen behind from Week 1 and Amos and Elo are tied for first, but all performances are low due to a quite the occasion this past week.

Crazy Stat of Day: Sunday marked the first time that the Raiders, Jaguars, Browns, Buccaneers and Redskins all won on the same day.

— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) September 21, 2015

Wins by Oakland, Jacksonville and Tampa Bay hurt all models. Surprisingly, all three models predicted Cleveland’s win over Tennessee, but only Amos was able to predict Washington’s win over St. Louis, coupled with a Denver over Kansas City pick, enabling Amos to pass Bing and tie with Elo.

Amos went 9-7 (56%) this week, moving up in the standings with an incredible differential prediction of Washington over St. Louis. Slightly less impressive, Amos also picked Denver over Kansas City. A big week for Amos to get back up with its peers while still a low accuracy week.

FPI went 9-7 (56%) as well, also predicting Denver over Kansas City and New England over Buffalo.

Bing had a terrible week, going 6-10 (38%). Bing’s performance poor performance was driven by misses all over the board with the losses of Chicago, Kansas City, Buffalo, and Indianapolis.

Elo also had relatively rough week, only getting to 8-8 (50%). The performance was driven by its misses of Kansas City and Indianapolis games.

Moving on into Week 3 picks, it looks to be a fairly tame week in the prediction arena. There is a large amount of consensus with only 4 games with differences.

Deviations provide an opportunity for models to pull away from the others, with the risk of falling behind. This week we will see 4. Amos is favoring Detroit over Denver. A bold move as all other models are in agreement over Denver. Similarly, Elo is favoring NY Jets over Philadelphia while all other models a favoring Philadelphia. Bing is also squaring off against the models favoring St. Louis over Pittsburgh and Atlanta over Dallas. Finally, all four models are split between Philadelphia @ NY Jets.

Below outlines the picks by model, but also illustrates confidence differences between models.

Finally, from the performances of each of the teams, Amos has simulated the rest of the season. See the results below and each team’s change from the last week.

Week 1: 11-5

Week 2: 9-7

Week 4: 9-6

Week 5: 10-4

Week 6: 10-4

Week 7: 9-5

Week 8: 10-4

Week 9: 7-6

HALFTIME REPORT & Week 10: 5-9

Week 11: 10-4

Week 12: 9-7

Week 13: 11-5

Week 14: 9-7

Week 15: 14-2

Week 16: 7-9

Week 17: 9-7

Wildcard: 3-1

Divisional: 2-2

Conference: Predictions