Orb Analytics Week 17 Preview – Picks & Insights
The Orb model had itself a merry Christmas Day as it hit on two moneyline picks as well as on its only spread prediction of the holiday. This gave us a nice +1.967 unit start to Week 17 and more importantly a 1-0 start against the spread.
Roger Goodell and the league continue to get greedy around the Holidays and gave us 6 games prior to Sunday’s slate. We have no control over which games all our models agree on which broke in favor of our paid readers this week who get all the non-Sunday picks that the Orb makes. After hitting on the first spread of the week, our models have two spread predictions on Saturday but just one for the Sunday slate of games. So we end up with a low-to-normal volume of predictions for the week, the majority of them just happen to be before Sunday.
Here is what the Orb predicts will happen on Sunday:
Spreads:
Bills -8.5
Moneyline:
Bills
Buccaneers
Dolphins
Commanders
As we get to the final few weeks of the season, I have to start manually removing games once certain teams fully commit to losing for a better draft pick or are locked into their playoff position. Without some semblance of a team’s best effort, these matchups become bad data even before they kick off. A good example of this is on Sunday the Raiders-Saints game where all our models are technically on the Saints +1.5, but with Carr being out and both of these teams currently sitting in the top 10 picks in next year’s draft, I have withheld it as it wouldn’t be fair to the project to give this out as an official Orb pick with all the uncertainty surrounding the game.
This is probably the most subjective part of our modeling process, and I want to try to quantify more going forward. Last season Week 18 was removed entirely from being official picks since most teams were playing backup quarterbacks and many were hoping to lose and secure a top pick. It is the same idea as why we don’t count week 1 picks toward our official season record. Bad data in is bad data out.
I will try my best to see how many of next week’s picks are on games in which both teams are playing for something and with reasonable confidence will be playing their starters as much as possible. Otherwise, we may have a low volume of official picks to round out the season. Again, this is part of our modeling strategy to give the project its best possible chance at successfully predicting the future. As soon as additional variables like a team completely giving up on the season or another resting its starters because they have the bye-week locked in enter the equation, we have even less of an advantage over the unpredictability of the NFL. With how inherently rigged the game we play is, it is hard enough to model this league profitably even when all knowns are known.
- Team Orb Analytics
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