Monday, July 27, 2009

NFL: Pythagorean Projection II: 2007-2008

As discussed in Part I, Pythagorean Projection is a technique for projecting a team's future wins based on their points scored and allowed the previous season.

In Part I, I looked at how it performed over 14 seasons of data (projections from 1993 to 2007, corresponding resuls from 1994 to 2008). In Part II, I'm going to look at the 2007 projections as compared to the 2008 results.

As with Part I, the results are ranked according to the difference between the projected and actual wins, as an absolute value, sorted from smallest to largest difference.

TeamProj. ActualDiff. Comment
Raiders 4.9 5.0 -0.1
Texans 7.9 8.0 -0.1
Saints 7.8 8.0 -0.2
Eagles 9.1 9.5 -0.4
Vikings 9.5 10.0 -0.5
Colts 12.5 12.0 0.5
Steelers 11.4 12.0 -0.6
Redskins 8.7 8.0 0.7
Cardinals 8.1 9.0 -0.9
Buccaneers 10.0 9.0 1.0
Bears 7.6 9.0 -1.4
Rams 3.7 2.0 1.7
Cowboys 11.0 9.0 2.0 Tony Romo hurt
Bills 4.9 7.0 -2.1
Broncos 5.7 8.0 -2.3
Chiefs 4.5 2.0 2.5
Patriots 13.8 11.0 2.8 Brady hurt week 1
49ers 3.7 7.0 -3.3 Singletary take over week 8
Chargers 11.3 8.0 3.3
Giants 8.6 12.0 -3.4
Jets 5.4 9.0 -3.6 Favre comes to town
Bengals 7.9 4.0 3.9 Carson Palmer hurt
Browns 8.5 4.0 4.5 Derek Anderson, Brady Quinn hurt
Titans 8.1 13.0 -4.9 Kerry Colins comes in, week 1
Packers 11.5 6.0 5.5 New QB; Defense collapsed
Lions 5.7 0.0 5.7 Was 2007 a fluke season?
Jaguars 10.7 5.0 5.7
Ravens 5.0 11.0 -6.0 New QB, HC
Panthers 5.6 12.0 -6.4 Jake Delhomme stays healthy
Seahawks 10.7 4.0 6.7 Injuries, HC issues
Falcons 4.0 11.0 -7.0 New QB, HC
Dolphins 3.8 11.0 -7.2 Parcells; new QB, HC

Broken down into the ranges used in part 1, we have:

Range # of Teams % of 32 Classification
0≤δ≤ 2 13 40.6%  Reasonably Close
2<δ≤ 4 9 28.1%  Moderately Close
4<δ≤ 8 10 31.3%  Wrong
8 00.0%  Yikes!

(Note that in Part I, the difference was expressed in winning percentage; here it is expressed in games won in a 16-game season.)

Comments:

  • The Lions had a terrible pass defense in 2007. 4 of their first 6 wins were against teams with weak pass offenses (only the Vikings and Broncos were ranked over #18).

  • This also shows a weakness of Pythagorean Projection: it doesn't easily produce extreme values. Only 3 teams (Rams, 49ers, and Dolphins) were projected to have fewer than 4 wins, and only 2 teams (Colts and Patriots) were projected to have more than 12.

  • Perhaps most interesting is that in the cases where Pythagorean Projection missed by the most, there are some typical issues: coaching, QB changes, and key injuries most often.

  • The 1994-2008 data set (detailed in Part I) had 21.9% of the projections fall at least 4 games (or 25%) away from the actual winning record. The 31.3% this range in 2008 is a notable increase over that. For a 32-team field, the difference is about three teams, which means the remarkable turn-arounds of the Ravens, Falcons, and Dolphins can account for the difference. It will be interesting to see if we see similar turn-arounds (or collapses?) in 2009.

Coming up

In part 3, I'll take a look at the projections for the 2009 season.

Friday, July 24, 2009

NFL: Pythagorean Projection I: 1994-2008

Introduction

Those of you who have spent much time reading footballoutsiders may have noticed they often talk about something called a 'Pythagorean projection', and seem to take it pretty seriously.

Pythagorean projection is a technique (full details here) of taking, for each team, the number of points they score and allow, and using that to project the winning percentage for the next season.

The result is a number in the range from 0.000 to 1.000, which is taken as the predicted winning percentage (0.000 would mean predicting no games won; 1.000 would mean predicting all games won).

Every Season since 1993

I'm going to go back to 1993, since at or just before 1993 is when a lot of important features of the current NFL system were adopted:

  • Free agency
  • Salary Cap
  • 6 teams (per conference) playoff format
  • Bye week

This results in 461 projections, with 461 actual results to compare to. (Note that for some teams and seasons, like the Browns in 1999, or the Texans in 2002, there was no 'previous season' to provide a projection, and so are not included in this data set.)

The Full Data Set

The graph below displays the 461 projections compared with the corresponding actual result. Here is how the data points were produced:

For each season from 1994 to 2008, for each team with PF/PA values from the previous season:

  1. The actual winning percentage was computed for the team for that season.

  2. The projected winning percentage was computed using the Pythagorean method.

  3. The difference between actual and projected winning percentage is computed (using absolute value, since a miss below isn't better than a miss above).

  4. The values are then sorted from lowest (values near 0% indicate a near-perfect projection) to highest (high values indicate... well, situations where Pythagorean projection didn't work so well).

Here is what a plot of these numbers looks like:


Click for full size

Some details:

Range# of Data Points% of 461Classification
0.0≤δ≤ 12.520143.6% Reasonably Close
12.5<δ≤ 25.015934.5% Moderately Close
25.0<δ≤ 50.09721.0% Wrong
50.040.9% Yikes!

Outliers

As a predictive method, Pythagorean Projection isn't something to bet the farm on. However, it can be interesting to look at the teams it missed on. Below are the 4 teams in the above data set where the projected and actual winning percentages differed by more than 50%.

  • 1994 Houston Oilers (actual: 2-14 projected 11.8 wins)
    In 1993, the Oilers won the AFC Central with a 12-4 record. This is before I paid very close attention to the game, but Wikipedia does indicate that there was serious conflict on the coaching staff in 1993. In 1994, head coach Jack Pardee was fired after a 1-9 start to the season, and Jeff Fisher was brought in as the new head coach.

  • 1999 Indianapolis Colts (actual: 13-3 projected 4.8 wins)
    The Colts were a doormat team for a long time after Unitas left. That didn't really change until 1999, which was Peyton Manning's second season.

  • 2001 Chicago Bears (actual 13-3 projected 4.8 wins)
    2002 Chicago Bears (actual 4-12 projected 12.3 wins)
    From 1996-2004 (inclusive), the Bears didn't win more than 7 games in a season, except for 2001. Part of it was fluke wins (including a couple improbable OT victories), part of it was the Bears' defense showing signs of what would take them to the Super Bowl a few years later.

Coming up

In part 2, I'll take a look at how Pythagorean Projection performed on the 2008 season.