NFL Week 2 Newsletter and Picks

Week 1 is in the books and we finally have some 2024 data to analyze! Unlike what we saw last year, the favored teams came out firing, going 11/16 against the spread and winning 13/16 games. This is a very chalk week against the sportsbooks meaning if you randomly picked a favorite to win or cover you probably had a pretty good weekend. This wasn’t good for the Orb’s very first pick of the season as the models predicted the Packers to upset the Eagles and win the game outright as underdogs. Starting out the week in a -2 unit hole was not an ideal place to find ourselves. But the Orb fought back and had a solid weekend going 2-1 against the spread and 6-1 on moneyline picks including the Monday Night 49ers pick. Vegas set some sharp lines considering they also didn’t have any data on the teams we saw on the field. The Orb found itself both on the right and wrong side of a 0.5 point difference as it hit on the Colts keeping it within 2.5 but missed on the Dolphins as they only won by 3 and did not cover the 3.5 line.  This resulted in our first-ever +unit week 1 overall! Albeit quite a small one. Regardless it is cool to see a + sign in week with so much built-in uncertainty as the models showed that maybe sometimes bad data in can lead to ok results out. We are lenient on the models in week 1 as having to use last season’s data as predictors is not a fair representation of what this project was designed for. But unlike last season, this time around our throw-away data week turned ok which is hopefully a sign of good things to come. Here is how the Orb’s picks performed:

Spread:

• Packers +2.5 ❌

• Dolphins -3 ❌

• Colts +2.5 ✅

• Chargers -3 ✅

Spread picks: 2-2, 50%, -0.182 units

Moneyline:

• Packers ❌ 

• Dolphins ✅

• Bengals ❌

• Saints ✅

• Bills ✅

• Chargers ✅

• Seahawks ✅

• 49ers ✅

Moneyline picks: 6-2, 75%, +0.878 units

Overall: +0.696 units.

Something I want to track better this year is how each model is performing individually rather than just the Orb picks. This way when there is a split decision on a premium pick and you see each model’s prediction you know the hit rate of each model. If one model is significantly outperforming the others, that may be important information to know. These overall records will not include games I manually remove like when a starting quarterback is out and the line doesn’t reflect what it would if he were playing. So the total counts may be less than how many games have been played through that point in the season. Here is how each model performed against every game in week 1:

Spreads:

Moneyline:

The moneyline table successfully shows the goal for our multi-model approach. We want the last row, the combination that makes the Orb, to have an accuracy rate higher than any individual model. Hopefully, the spread picks will follow suit starting this weekend.

We now have one week of team data to overreact to and over-index on. So the only information our models see for each team is what they did last weekend. That being said, the Orb was not afraid to pick some scary teams in Sunday’s slate. In week 2 last season, favorites covered just 5/16 games but won 10/16 outright. This was a great example of how the numbers can be swayed when we only have one week of data. Any of the teams that struggled or looked bad in week 1 could turn it around and end up being a contender this year. But the numbers will show them as they were at their worst so they may be undervalued heading into week 2. The opposite is true of any team that overperformed in the opening week, as they may be overvalued by the oddsmakers before they start to regress to their mean. After just a disastrous Thursday night, the Orb predicts the underdog trend will continue Sunday as it is picking some teams that did not look ready for the season to start last weekend:

Spread:

• Dolphins -2.5 ❌

• Lions -7.5

• Browns +3.5

• Panthers +4.5

• Titans +3.5

Moneyline:

• Dolphins ❌

• Lions

• 49ers

• Panthers

• Seahawks

• Commanders

It is a new year which means we are starting with a clean slate with our good friends, the Carolina Panthers. For anyone new to the page, the Panthers basically broke our models last year. Their underlying numbers were not quite as the team was on the field. This led to the Orb picking them to cover as underdogs more often than not, which they never did. It got to the point where Carolina picks started to hurt our record by a few percentage points so I hard-coded out all picks that included the Panthers by the end of the season.  But after picking the Saints to beat them last week, our models are back to seeing value in a Panthers team that had the worst week 1 in the league. Not only do they like Carolina being handed essentially a touchdown, but they are predicting them to win outright and upset the Chargers, which is at +240 odds as of when I’m writing this. So they have an opportunity to make amends with the Orb and make us look smart to start the year. They just as likely have an opportunity to start their journey back to being removed from our models entirely. 

I was going back and forth with one of our newer readers who had some really great input regarding the moneyline model and how it relates to underdog upsets. As I’ve mentioned before, giving out favorites to win isn’t exciting and everyone loves the +money sign next to the underdog. By definition, every game that the Orb does not give a moneyline pick for means the models disagree on the outcome. So at least one, if not two of our models predict the underdog to win. Quickly looking at last season, in games in which the Orb did not make a pick due to disagreement amongst the models the underdogs won outright 40% of the time. This is a +8% increase over their standard 32% upset rate. So especially in week 2 when history is on their side, it will be interesting to watch for upsets in the games the Orb did not pick a moneyline. 

Let’s have a great week 2 and try to replicate last season’s early success! For all our sakes, let us hope Bryce Young figures it out and starts looking like the #1 overall pick the Panthers traded for and drafted. 

- Team Orb Analytics

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