Orb Analytics Week 18 Preview – "Picks" & Insights
Week 18 is finally here! Over the summer, the season always feels like it takes so long to get here and then you blink and suddenly we have a week with only a small handful of meaningful games. While I don’t think it has been the single most compelling regular season we have gotten from the NFL in recent years, every year brings its own storylines, drama, and history. Plus, the best part is still to come!
Like many fans, I am ready to leave some of these teams in 2024 and gear up for what could be some amazing playoff matchups. While there has been a huge disparity between the top and bottom teams this regular season, each conference will enter the playoffs with at least three teams that I wouldn’t be surprised if they made or won the Superbowl. We have a ton of playoff content we are excited to put out, of course including Orb model picks, leans, and stay-aways. But before we get there, we technically need to get through week 18.
And that is just what this weekend is for us, a technicality. Going into the season my strategy for our model was to replicate last year, meaning that the Orb’s official season is Weeks 2-17. Weeks 1 and 18 have too much uncertainty and bad data to risk our official record on. And while I was hoping that the Orb would make some spread picks on any of the few games we deemed that both teams needed to win due to playoff implications, sadly there was no alignment from our models. So the picks below are just an exercise to keep the models running as they too gear up for the playoffs. Even if we were to go perfect on the picks below (and make it two weeks in a row!), they wouldn't be added to our official season accuracy and unit performance. But this week’s picks were made on data produced from the best available rosters this season and not the ones we are going to see this weekend. And as expected, we got some weird results so let’s have some fun with it. So with that heavy disclaimer firmly in place, here are the Orb’s unofficial picks for the last week of the regular season:
Spreads:
Panthers +7.5
Commanders -6.5
Bills -2.5
Chiefs +10.5
Rams +6.5
Moneyline:
Ravens
Falcons
Commanders
Packers
Colts
Bills
Eagles
Buccaneers
Chargers
With these picks being just an exercise and unofficial, I felt it was right to include the Orb’s picks on the Panthers. After swearing them off from being included in the Orb’s season early in the year, I couldn’t help but not-not manually remove them today. Since we disavowed Carolina, Bryce’s improvement and the fight this team has shown in most of their games have been one of my favorite stories of the year. Since it won’t “count” even if they cover, let’s keep the Panthers pick on the list for old-time's sake. Plus as you can see, some of these picks are on teams that won’t be playing their starting quarterback anyway. The Orb is essentially the Chiefs this weekend. Putting out picks, or players, that we never would if this week counted towards our record but thankfully we have the 1-seed (a winning, profitable season) locked up!
The end of the regular season is typically forgettable, but we just need to get through this weekend and we will then have nothing but meaningful football. From a modeling perspective, we do separate the regular and post-season. Many of the metrics we use in our models don’t update in the playoffs so we have to use each team’s data from the end of the regular season. While this is the best we can do at the moment, it does have flaws that can be best explained by the Kansas City Chiefs last season. Similar to their play this season rather than their impressive record, they weren’t as good as we expected in the regular season last year, and then as soon as the playoffs started they turned back into the Chiefs we all know. The Orb picked against them every round until the Super Bowl when it finally bent the knee and picked them over San Francisco. The point is that their run of form in the playoffs (and specifically their defensive improvement) was not captured in some of the metrics like it would have been if they had played in the regular season. But we do very much run the Orb throughout the playoffs and also want to provide some additional value through descriptive statistics to help you form your own data-driven decisions. We are just as excited to model the playoff matchups as we are to watch them.
I will write about it more in our regular season recap next week, but I can’t thank you our readers enough. Whether you have been with us for multiple seasons now or just subscribed to our work yesterday, thank you for continuing to read our content and supporting the page. The interactions with you and the positive (or even negative) feedback we get make the Orb project worth it!
- Team Orb Analytics
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