Orb Analytics Week 11 Recap – Performance & Results
It's time to face the music! While we never make any promises of results, we do promise transparency and honesty when our model misses picks, and that is exactly what it did on Sunday. After hitting on the Eagles Thursday Night, the Orb was sitting at exactly 60.0% on the season. If past performance was a promise of future results, this would have meant that our models would have gone either 3-1 or 2-2 against Sunday’s 4-pick slate with not enough picks to reach exactly 60%. However, in the world of data and predictive modeling, past performance is never a guarantee of future results. This is what we saw play out in an embarrassing Sunday performance as the Orb missed every one of its spread predictions. This left us with a 1-4 record ATS on the weekend, on par with our worst ever which we had to start our season in Week 2.
There are a few ways I could write about this, including a ‘doomsday’ tone where I say that Sunday may have steered the whole season off track. But I don’t think that is true or entirely fair to the work that has gone into this year and the results we have gotten out of it so far. After that horrible Week 2 start to our season, the Orb performed up to its potential, dug itself out of that hole, and over the last few weeks has been bouncing right above/below 60% ATS on the season. When the model is doing so well, it’s human nature to subconsciously re-adjust our goals and redefine ‘success’ for this project. 60% on the season is a dream we hope to achieve one day but not our Northstar goal. As we saw on Sunday, even with all the data in the world, predicting the future is hard! The whole focus of the Orb project is trying to achieve profitability above the 52.4% target goal in the long term, and Sunday was a not-so-gentle reminder of why that 2.4% edge over flipping a coin is so important and so difficult to achieve. So while Week 11 was nothing short of a disaster for the Orb, going into the season, if you had told me we were going to have two (2) separate 1-4 performances and the models would still be sitting at 55.6% against the spread overall, I would sign on the dotted line right away.
Some quick lessons we learned from the games we got wrong.
- The Bears aren’t fully dead. Over the last four weeks, they have put together what has to be the most demoralizing losses to any fanbase. But I think there are a lot of positives for Chicago fans to take away from this game. Playing against a rival in a game where the markets said the Packers were 5.5 points better in Soldier Field, the Bears showed a lot of fight and were one freak play away from a game they deserved to win.
- This might just be who the Titans are. They show signs of life through good defensive stops and the occasional big play on offense, but at the end of the game are always down by at least two scores. A good win for Minnesota who will need to stack every win they can get as a team that most likely won’t win their own division.
- Bo Nix is fully here. The Broncos are firing on all cylinders and while they have struggled against some of the elite teams in the league, they are built to really beat up on the bad ones. Watching this one play out, I think that might be who these Falcons are. A bad team. Thankfully for Atlanta, they play in the most winnable division in football, but they simply were outmatched in this one.
- My personal belief in the Seahawks finally paid off. Whenever I have watched Seattle this year, I don’t understand why they aren’t better. They were the better team today, particularly on defense, and deserved the win on the road. When talking about teams and players I try to take the positive angle more often than not. But I wouldn’t be honest if I weren’t critical of San Francisco. I am getting a little tired of this team being talked about as one of the best in the NFC. People already penciled them in to go on a crazy run in the second half of the season and to win their division, and I don’t know if I see it anymore. They are tough to model since their advanced stats are always better than the team we see on the field so a lot of algorithms like ours tend to rate them higher than I would as a fan who watched the games play out. Without getting too negative about a player who I am lower on than most, I will simply say that I believe the better quarterback won.
Here is how each pick from the Orb performed in a Week 11 to forget:
Spreads:
Eagles -3.5 (TNF - Premium) ✅
Packers -5.5 ❌
Titans +5.5 ❌
Falcons +1.5 ❌
49ers -6.5 ❌
All Spreads: 1-4, 20%, -3.091 units
Moneyline:
Eagles -3.5 (TNF - Premium) ✅
Lions ✅
Packers ✅
Rams ✅
Ravens ❌
49ers ❌
Falcons ❌
Bills ✅
Texans (MNF - Premium) ✅
All moneyline: 6-3, 66.7%, -0.511 units
Overall -3.603 units. Is that bad? It seems bad.
Week 11 Model Performance:
Favorites covered 10/14 games (71.4%) and won 11/14 outright (78.6%).
Weekly spreads:
Weekly Moneyline:
Season-To-Date Model Performance:
Not including week 1, favorites have covered 79/150 games (52.7%) and won 101/150 (67.3%) outright this season.
Season spreads:
Season moneyline:
Official Orb Picks Season Results:
Season spread picks: 30-24, 55.6%, +3.3 units
Season moneyline picks: 61-30, 67.0%, +1.3 units
Confusion Matrix:
Losing 3.6% of our accuracy rate in one day is never fun, but the positive spin is that our models put themselves in a position to withstand such a bad performance and stay above our target goal. We know that losing or maintaining accuracy is significantly easier than increasing it if you are already hitting above 50%. For example, an inverse of this terrible performance in week 12 going 4-1 wouldn’t bring us back up to the 59.2% rate we were at heading into the week. But we have a lot of season left, and the Orb is ready to fight for every percentage point possible in our journey to try and end the season above 52.4% against the spread. The season-long success heading into Week 11 combined with some really promising things developing behind the scenes at the Orb is too exciting to let one bad week get us down. We are onto week 12!
NFL Fan Poll:
With every team now within one game of each other, who do you predict will win the NFC West?
- Team Orb Analytics
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