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FiveThirtyEight predicts 7 wins for Jets


JohnnnyBONES

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This is a pretty interesting read overall.  They're setting the Pats wins at 9.5.  Seems low, but these geeks are not to stifled with.  http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/2014-nfl-preview-the-patriotic-afc-east/

 

 

 

 

New York Jets
  • Expected wins: 7.0
  • Playoff probability: 25 percent (15 percent to win the AFC East)
  • Super Bowl win probability: 1 percent

 

Five of the eight Jets victories last year were by a touchdown or less, and none was by greater than 13 points. That’s unusual — point differential tends to be fairly predictive of a team’s record. As in baseball, we can calculate a Pythagorean win total for each team that indicates how many games it should have won based off its point differential over the season.

 

My colleague Neil Paine did so in 2013 and recently updated his work by controlling for a team’s strength of schedule. According to his formula, the Jets should have won only 5.3 games last year, 2.7 wins fewer than they actually picked up. That makes the Jets a clear outlier — one that twice exceeded the standard error of estimate. Since the NFL-AFL merger in 1970, teams outperformed their Pythagorean win total by as much as the Jets did last year only 32 times.

 

Such unexpected performance in one season has been somewhat useful in helping to predict the next. For the aforementioned 32 teams that outperformed expectation, the median win total the next season was 3.0 wins lower than it was the prior season. That’s very close to the 3.2 fewer wins that the Pythagorean win total suggested these teams should have had in the prior year. Only one team of the 32 actually saw its win total increase from the prior year.

 

The Jets can potentially take comfort in the performance of the 2013 Indianapolis Colts. The Colts were able to win 11 games in 2013, even though the 2012 Colts finished five wins better than their Pythagorean win total suggested. And like the 2013 Colts, the 2014 Jets will be starting a second-year quarterback, Geno Smith.

 

I doubt, though, that many people would confuse Smith for Andrew Luck.

 

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