At work we have an informal football pool. Basically, whomever picks the most winners for the week wins, with the points from the Monday night game as a tiebreaker.
For some reason I am horrible at picking winners. I typically average in the 30-40% range. In other words, significantly worse than random chance. I would literally be better off flipping a coin. In fact, that’s a bit of a running joke now. I’ll come in Monday morning and coworkers will ask me if I beat the coin. No, turning in the opposite of my picks doesn’t work either. I did that two weeks ago and ended up 5-8. This week I’m sitting at 4 picks with the Monday game still to play (got Titans-Jags, Texans-Giants, Browns-Chargers, and Broncos-Steelers). I picked Seattle tonight, so probably Oakland is going to come up with the upset. I don’t really have a system aside from a few rules of thumb:
I usually give close games to the home team.
There’s always upsets every weekend, so I make sure I have a couple.
Never pick the Lions to win, ever.
So, what am I doing wrong? Am I just cursed or something?
In the sports section you will find the pro picks. Use them as a guide. Some games the spot makes the pick obvious. Close ones wing it. Thats what the gamblers do.
The last few weeks have had a lot of strange upset games. Don’t feel too bad, even the “experts” didn’t do so well in Week 7 – you’ll see that the best of them got 5-8 that week, on this page.
I’ve been picking the games, too – sort of an informal contest with a friend. And while I did rather well in the first 5 weeks, my records in the next 3 weeks have been 7-6, 5-8, and 7-7. Somewhat mediocre. (Note that my 5-8 week was tied with those “experts” on that Yahoo page I linked above). Lots of strange upsets lately.
The problem though with making sure you predict a couple of upsets because there are “upsets every week” is: what happens when you predict the wrong ones? Then those go against you, as do the REAL upsets – the damage is doubled. Better to not go counting on specific upsets unless it’s one you have a particularly strong feeling about (or strong reasons for).
I usually do the “close games to the home team” also – especially if it’s two stinker teams. Don’t count out momentum from recent games, also.
“Never pick the Lions” was formerly a good technique, but they’ve won a couple recently. For a while, that was my philosophy about Houston – but now I think it’s shifted to Arizona. They have repeatedly proven that they don’t know how to win. Even when the “Bears were who we thought they were!”
There’s no magic way to pick winners in the NFL. Even if it was your job to be informed and write about the NFL, say, for example, Paul “Dr. Z” Zimmerman of Sports Illustrated, you might struggle to reach the .500 mark over the course of the season. Zimmerman’s pick record this year is 29-33.
You’re calling the winners straight up, or are you playing with points? FWIW, I think the “underdogs” are something like 60% against the spread. YMMV (wildly).
