Comments on: We don’t know anything and we never will http://www.footballperspective.com/we-dont-know-anything-and-we-never-will/ NFL History and Stats Wed, 04 Nov 2015 23:24:00 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 By: Aaron Josef Kelly http://www.footballperspective.com/we-dont-know-anything-and-we-never-will/#comment-312113 Wed, 04 Nov 2015 23:24:00 +0000 http://www.footballperspective.com/?p=3073#comment-312113 In order to get a decent understanding of whether betting lines are all just a bunch of garbage, we would need to actually compare it to a baseline expectation distribution. I would suggest to look at the same analysis with class labels permuted to determine whether if the data are random, you see a worse “line off” than you do in the real data or not. This will allow you to infer if the efforts used to determine betting lines are leading to statistically significant results compared to random. Just looking at these raw data doesn’t really give us any kind of information. I don’t know if being 10 points off on average in our estimations is good or bad unless i know what it would be like in a randomly chosen betting lines scenario.

]]> By: George http://www.footballperspective.com/we-dont-know-anything-and-we-never-will/#comment-2290 Wed, 10 Oct 2012 17:54:31 +0000 http://www.footballperspective.com/?p=3073#comment-2290 In reply to Richie.

I guess the ONLY thing that might have some bearing is if the public perception of the Baltimore Ravens has had a specific bias over that decade.

Super fair point – and I think it is a case of the above – e.g. what does the average person think about when they think of Baltimore, Ray Lewis, the D, and the D doesn’t score a great deal of points (directly except for that year when Ed Reed returned a load). In terms of the splits on 38-21-3

2002: 1-1
2003: 5-1-1
2004: 5-3
2005: 4-1
2006: 5-2
2007: 1-3
2008: 5-1
2009: 5-2
2010: 3-4-1
2011: 4-3-1

Given the Levitt study that I mentioned above where they found home favourites in the sample in the study (so relevant to the above wasn’t over 10 years but principle) only won 49.6% of the time you could argue that this is statistically significant (I haven’t worked this out yet – gut feeling). You’ve got to wonder why the linemakers haven’t caught up to this and you could possibly argue that they are taking advantage of the perceived public bias against the Ravens Offense (and the fact that it is low scoring) and are setting the line too low when they are home favourite?

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