Wow, this week’s survival pool is even harder than last week. In fact I think it may be the hardest survival week I ever recall seeing. Everyone is close.
You mean this upcoming week? No double-digit favorites or anything, but there is at least one game I rather like.
Oh, and I went 13-1 in the spread pick 'em league. Got a 5 game lead, and 8 over 3rd place.
Yeah, this week. KC over Buffalo seems like the best option, but Buffalo almost beat Baltimore and their offense has been clicking. What’s the second best game after that? Not a big fan of any games this week.
Right, KC over Buffalo is the one game I like, but I really do like it even more than the 7.5 point spread would indicate. I’ve been riding KC since Week 1 and they’re still undervalued, and they’re a legitimately tough home team*, while Buffalo is quite possibly the worst team in the league. I’d bet KC up to -9.5, and maybe even -10.
As to what’s the next best game … yeah, that is tough. Either Colts over Texans or (more likely) Jets over Packers, but both of those would make me very nervous. Eh, actually, New England over Minnesota is probably in the same class as those two. I guess that would be my second game. It’s the only one that doesn’t raise my blood pressure.
- – Back when I was doing my spreadsheet, I toyed with giving different bonuses for home field advantage to teams that were unusually good or bad at home. The only reasonable change I could make that improved both results and the correlation coefficients of the sheet’s predictions was to give both KC and Denver a moderate bump at home, equivalent to roughly a 5-point advantage instead of the usual 3.2 or so.
Last year at least I gave up on the pick 'em leagues maybe 2/3 of the way through, which would explain my rock-bottom placing. I would’ve been mired around the middle of the pack in both (a bit below the median in spread, a bit above in confidence). I just lost all interest. I may or may not have done something similar prior to 2007, but my memory doesn’t permit me to say with any degree of certainty.
I actually wasn’t that interested in my fantasy teams for a spell, either, but of course it would have been horribly rude to abandon any of those. And I did still manage to win the He Hate Me league and the yardage pool competition.[/bragging]
You didn’t give up in the sense that you stopped trying, because your games picked is the a full season’s worth of games, same as everyone else. You might’ve half-assed it, but it’s still impressive to pick 67-151 on what’s roughly a 50-50 proposition at worst. You also got your two survival strikes in week 2 and 3 
Not trying to bash you, just trying to reel in your proclaimations of success a little bit. It was also interesting how you’re either way at the top or way at the bottom with very little in the middle.
I definitely stopped picking at some point, this I can guarantee. If you don’t make a selection, Yahoo marks it down as an incorrect pick at kickoff, which I presume is how I managed a 31% win rate. Are the details of any of the pick 'em leagues archived by Yahoo or something? All I can find in my profile is my team name and rank within the league. (And how could I have an overall record of 67-151? There are 256 games in a season. Or is this what I’m missing?)
(One of my strikes in the survival league – I’m *pretty *sure – was also due to a missed week … though I have a vague recollection of thinking “Oh well, my team would have lost anyway.”)
Oh, you’re right, that’s strange. At some point yahoo didn’t used to count empty picks as incorrect picks, so you’d see the people who dropped out of the league have records involving fewer games than anyone else. ie at the end of the year someone might be 70-46 if that’s where they were when they quit.
You actually have 67-171 as a record (238) which is 256 minus the dropped week…minus 2. Which I can’t explain since if you dropped week was a week where some teams had a bye, it should be higher than 240, not lower, right?
As far as I can tell, yahoo doesn’t store league data except in people’s personal histories. Which sucks, since I only started keeping detailed records last year. And those are flawed, since I thought I remembered them not counting empty games as losses, so I can’t use them to come up with a multiyear/multileague percentage.
It’s because of pushes. For instance, I am 43-43 right now in the current spread league. There have been 104 total games; I dropped week 6 so that leaves 90. There have been 4 pushes in weeks other than 6, so that leaves 86.
It lists how many perfect survivors (with no strikes) remain every week. Does anyone know what number of people started the contest?
I don’t see that listed anywhere, but it does give the percentage of correct picks each week. With 43,233 as the current number, running the percentages backwards gives a starting number of 263,715.
There’s a problem with that, though, because of double-elimination leagues like ours. People who have already had 2 strikes are double-counted, so the real number of people should be less than that 263,000.
That sounds about right. I wonder if it accounts for that issue and doesn’t double-count multistrike leagues and only counts new first strikes in its percentages. Because I recall the number being somewhere around 250k.
Boss of Bosses, I don’t know what your SDMB name is but you have pick em leagues empty.
What happens in survival with a tie?
We didn’t lose anyone in survival, except Garygnu who didn’t bother to pick anyone and was eliminated.
Shibb, did you pick your confidence values in descending order right down the line? Your confidence points read 13, 12, 11, 10… 1. Is that a big coincidence? Cause you’re in 4th place with that strategy. Not bad, although I guess you’ll end up worse than 4th since you only have 1 point to win tomorrow.
Yeah, I’ve been doing so badly that I didn’t really want to spend much thought on it. Still not bad considering the morass I’ve been in.
A nice spread of picks in the survival league this week. 5 different picks among 9 players.
Ugh Minnesota you are so bad.
Fuck Favre and fuck the Vikes for not running it in from the 3.