Regular readers know I'm a huge fan of Rotowire, which I plug now and again without incentive or even knowing any of the people involved with that site. During the football season, one of the weekly delights, for me at least, is Chris and Damon Liss's Beating the Book, a weekly feature where they roll out picks against the spread and then attempt to justify them.
Several years ago - I think it was 1999 - the Liss brothers were tremendously good at making the picks. They've struggled over the last few years, however, and last week returned them to .500 on the season and brought forth this week's manifesto.
One of the more amusing aspects of the weekly feature is how Chris and Damon regularly go over the previous week's selections and address each case where they were wrong, breaking the wrong guesses down into categories such as we-should-have-known-better, who-could-have-seen-that-coming, and that-will-never-happen-again. This is an exercise I don't recommend. It's one thing to go over where you went wrong, but it's another to assume that the final score was the only possible or probable final score. Just because a pick made you look stupid, that doesn't mean you are stupid. You have to expect to be wrong. And furhter, it's fun to look stupid once you embrace the accidental or random nature of looking stupid.
I wish I could link or copy the whole Liss brother pick 'em manifesto, but since they charge for access, I won't do that. Go read it (at the above link) if you have a subscription. Here's the thesis of this week's dissertation against the use of spreadsheets and formulas:
Picking games should be a spiritual pursuit, one where you have to master the limiting forces within yourself and connect with the purity of observation-derived insight.
God, I love that. They arrive at this after many paragraphs inveighing against the wisdom to be found in the usual offensive and defensive statistics.
The best person I've ever known at picking games against the spread is Dr. Bones, who usually claims to make all his picks in something under five minutes. For the most part, I believe he's telling the truth.
I've long thought that NFL statistics are mainly meaningless outside the context of wins and losses. I'll post long studies of Bucco hitters and pitchers using advanced metrics and what-not but you'll never catch me talking about the predictive meaning of things like Yards Per Passing Attempt. The statistics are useful as descriptions of what happened (e.g., Duce ran for 100 yards in four straight games) but useless as predictors of what will happen.
This is one of the reasons I fairly despise fantasy football. All that matters in football is the end result. The fact of winning or losing overshadows all other facts. In baseball, an individual's numeric performance says a lot about his contribution to the team's winning and losing. There's much more correlation between individual numbers and winning and losing. A quarterback can throw for 350 yards and lose. This often happens. Not too many baseball teams lose, however, when their leftfielder has six or eight RBIs. Fantasy baseball improves a regular fan's appreciation of the game; fantasy football, I think, only perverts it.
Good luck, Liss brothers, mastering the limiting forces within yourself. My one piece of advice would be to accept the real possibility that your wisest picks won't pan out. A corollary of this is not to take credit or adjust your opinion of yourself when things are going well. And oh yeah, I think it's a good idea to stop paying attention to things like how a team's rushing defense ranks or what kind of turnover differential they are currently running. You can avoid getting murdered by playing Pure Hunches provided you adopt the right attitude toward the various events that create or cause some teams to have greater Hunch appeal than others.
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