Orb Analytics Week 14 Recap – A Throwback (Winning) Performance!
The Orb had a solid performance in Week 14 and finally found itself back on the winning side. This ended what is now officially the project’s worst consecutive losing streak to date, hopefully never to be beaten.
We have received great feedback about the page recently and a recurring theme was slightly restructuring the recap posts. So we are going to give it a try and open with shorter, more league-specific takeaways and then I will have my recap of the model performance below the charts and data visualizations.
Some quick lessons we learned from the games the Orb made picks in on Sunday:
The Bills have flaws, especially on the road. A superman-esc fantasy football performance from Josh Allen could not overcome what Stafford and the Rams’ offense did to Buffalo’s secondary. While they are still easily one of the best teams in the league, I can’t imagine Week 14’s performance away from home made Bills fans more comfortable with having the AFC Playoffs potentially not go through Buffalo.
The Buccaneers can beat the teams they need to to make the playoffs. Despite last week’s game going into overtime against a newly frisky Panthers team, Tampa Bay has now handily beaten two bad teams in the last three weeks. With Atlanta’s arrow pointing down, not dropping the ‘easier’ games could be the difference in the division.
The NFC West is finally starting to take shape. Just a couple of weeks ago you could convince me that any of the four teams would take the division. But Seattle put themselves in the driver’s seat with a big win over Arizona and the Rams earned the most impressive win of the day to separate themselves from the other two for now. Thursday’s game between the Rams and 49ers could leave the Seahawks with full control of the division or it could set up the week 18 matchup to be one for the record books.
Here is how the Orb model performed in week 14:
Spreads:
Lions -3.5 (TNF - Premium) ❌
Buccaneers -6.5 ✅
Seahawks +2.5 ✅
Bills -3.5 ❌
Bengals -5.5 (MNF - Premium) ✅
All spreads: 3-2, 60.0%, +0.727 units
Moneyline:
Lions (TNF - Premium) ✅
Buccaneers ✅
Steelers ✅
Eagles ✅
Vikings ✅
Cardinals ❌
Bills ❌
Chiefs ✅
Bengals (MNF - Premium) ✅
All moneyline: 7-2, 77.8%, +0.604 units
Overall a +1.331 unit performance.
Week 14 Model Performance:
Favorites covered 6/13 games (46.2%) and won 10/13 outright (76.9%).
Weekly spreads:
Weekly Moneyline:
Season-To-Date Model Performance:
Not including week 1, favorites have covered 100/192 games (52.1%) and won 134/192 (69.8%) outright this season.
Season spreads:
Season moneyline:
Official Orb Picks Season Results:
Season spread picks: 37-33, 52.9%, +0.6 units
Season moneyline picks: 81-38, 68.1%, +1.4 units
Confusion Matrix:
Winning weeks were starting to feel like a thing of the past as nothing went the Orb’s way recently and the model’s performance dipped. While Week 14’s unit return won't make up for what we lost in our record-setting downturn, it just felt really encouraging to see the ‘+’ sign on our charts again. Just as I often mention that the model's performance above a certain threshold isn't mathematically sustainable, the same principle applies in the opposite direction during losing streaks.
Considering the implied odds of spread picks, the Orb was hitting at an ‘unsustainably bad’ rate in recent weeks. Mathematically it couldn’t keep up losing so much, otherwise, we would have built a perfect fade-model which is as difficult to do as building one that tries to win. In gambling terms, our models were simply due for a win, even if it was a small one.
I will write about it more in the Thursday Night blog, but it needs to be said that we got incredibly lucky in Monday Night’s game. A winning Sunday brought the week’s record to 2-2 against the spread and gave us the opportunity for a winning week with the Monday Night pick. Just like last week’s MNF result, we saw the ‘wrong’ pick end up being a flukey winner. Results like the Bengals covering are why we repeatedly talk about a ‘process over results’ mindset and also highlight how unpredictable and difficult the game we play is. But with how much has gone against the Orb recently, we graciously will take this gift from the gambling gods and are in no position to be handing back wins.
I mentioned that due to the losing streak, I started tweaking the model more than I did during the first half of the season when it was winning. Of course, a one-week sample isn’t enough to say that we have fixed any performance issues but it is always nice to see a change in the process lead to a change in results, even if they end up not being statistically significant in the long run. Only time will tell if this week is a sign of better things to come overall between now and week 18 or if it was just a mathematical one-week bounce in our favor.
- Team Orb Analytics
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