As promised in my last post, I’ve now built and deployed a web app that lets you poke through my preseason forecasts for the 2015 NFL regular season:
I learned several new tricks in the course of generating these forecasts and building this app, so the exercise served its didactic purpose. (You can find the code for the app here, on GitHub.) I also got lucky with the release of a new R package that solved a crucial problem I was having when I started to work on this project a couple of weeks ago. Open source software can be a wonderful thing.
The forecasts posted right now are based on results of the pairwise wiki survey through the morning of Monday, August 17. At that point, the survey had already logged upwards of 12,000 votes, triple the number cast in last year’s edition. This time around, I posted a link to the survey on the r/nfl subreddit, and that post produced a brief torrent of activity from what I hope was a relatively well-informed crowd.
The regular season doesn’t start until September, and I will update these forecasts at least once more before that happens. With so many votes already cast, though, the results will only change significantly if a) a large number of new votes are cast and b) those votes differ substantially from the ones already cast, and those conditions are highly unlikely to intersect.
One thing these forecasts help to illustrate is how noisy a game professional football is. By noisy, I mean hard to predict with precision. Even in games where one team is much stronger than the other, we still see tremendous variance in the simulated net scores and the associated outcomes. Heavy underdogs will win big every once in a while, and games we’d consider close when watching can produce a wide range of net scores.
Take, for example, the week 1 match-up between the Bears and Packers. Even though Chicago’s the home team, the simulation results (below) favor Green Bay by more than eight points. At the same time, those simulations also include a smattering of outcomes in which the Bears win by multiple touchdowns, and the peak of the distribution of simulations is pretty broad and flat. Some of that variance results from the many imperfections of the model and survey scores, but a lot of it is baked into the game, and plots of the predictive simulations nicely illustrate that noisiness.
The big thing that’s still missing from these forecasts is updating during the season. The statistical model that generates the predictive simulations takes just two inputs for each game — the difference between the two teams’ strength scores and the name of the home team — and, barring catastrophe, only one of those inputs can change as the season passes. I could leave the wiki survey running throughout the season, but the model that turns survey votes into scores doesn’t differentiate between recent and older votes, so updating the forecasts with the latest survey scores is unlikely to move the needle by much.*
I’m now hoping to use this problem as an entry point to learning about Bayesian updating and how to program it in R. Instead of updating the actual survey scores, we could treat the preseason scores as priors and then use observed game scores or outcomes to sequentially update estimates of them. I haven’t figured out how to implement this idea yet, but I’m working on it and will report back if I do.
* The pairwise wiki survey runs on open source software, and I can imagine modifying the instrument to give more weight to recent votes than older ones. Right now, I don’t have the programming skills to make those modifications, but I’m still hoping to find someone who might want to work with me, or just take it upon himself or herself, to do this.
Dart-Throwing Chimp 
Texas Cowman
/ August 19, 2015Re: One thing these forecasts help to illustrate is how noisy a game professional football is.
One of the problems is that each touchdown and the point after changes the score by
a whole 7 points. In soccer those scores would change very little. Another problem is
that some Defenses can get hot and put as many points on the board as the Offense does.
Those are the ones you can sometimes estimate. What you usually have no way
to predict are the games when the offense seems to suddenly go into the sleepy limbo of
unimagined fumble fingers and when the referees suddenly wake up in the second half, and they decide the game with penalties against mostly one team.