Before the season began, I hosted a contest where I asked you to submit 38 questions. Each question asked you about 38 pairs of numbers, with the contestant trying to guess which number will be bigger. I also calculated the percentage that each “side” of the bet received, based on 82 entries.

In early January, I looked at the first 19 questions (that post has been updated since the playoff results).  Yesterday, I looked at the remaining set of questions. Today, the contest results.

Here were the answers to each question, along with the percentage of entries that guessed correctly:

And, here were the number of answers guessed correctly by each contestant:

That makes JimZornsLemma the big winner, unless I calculated things incorrectly. I emailed Jim, and asked him his thoughts:

My thoughts: In general, one thing I try to be mindful of when doing things like this is the “power of the field.” That is, the idea that an outcome can be a heavy favorite when compared to any other outcome, but be a heavy underdog when compared to *all* other outcomes. I think this is something that is not always appreciated by the general public. However, among the audience of a site like Football Perspective, I’m sure this is much more well understood, and the questions clearly took this into account, as there was rarely an obvious “right” choice. One that I did feel was vely likely to pay off:

Maximum number of passing TDs by a player from this group: Ryan Fitzpatrick, Geno Smith, Josh McCown, Johnny Manziel, Brian Hoyer, and Ryan Mallett
Minimum number of passing TDs by a player from this group: Tony Romo, Peyton Manning, Andrew Luck, Ben Roethlisberger, Philip Rivers, Matt Ryan

The probability that at least one player from the former group would blowup and/or at least one player from the latter group would tank (or get injured) seems far north or 0.5 to me.

Other than that I tried to do mostly “head” picks with a few “heart” picks mixed in (it is for fun, after all). I got burned a few times by my pro-Seahawks bias (I’m a diehard 12), specifically I picked the Falcons over the Cardinals, even though I thought the Cardinals probably would be better, because I like Dan Quinn, and I’m sick of hearing what an amazing coach Bruce Arians is. (In my extremely biased opinion, Carroll has been a far more successful coach and gets way less love.)

The one I missed that I thought was mostly likely to hit:

Number of games started by Sam Bradford
Number of interceptions thrown by Kirk Cousins

I thought the Eagles’ offense would struggle; I thought Kirk Cousins would start all season and throw a lot of pass; and I thought Kirk Cousin was a lousy quarterback. Two out of three didn’t cut it this time. So in answer to your question Kirk: No, I did not like that. I did not like it at all.

This contest turned out to be pretty difficult, which I think is a good thing. The average was right at 19.01, which is pretty incredible given that there were 38 questions and I believe only one question (wins by the team with the fewest in the AFC East vs. wins by the Bears) turned out to be a tie. Even Jim got just south of 66% of all questions correct.

I thought this was a lot of fun, so I hope you did, too. Hopefully I remember to run this again next year.