July 23, 2022
<aside> 📝 This is part of my 30-post speed writing goal I’m calling my Dry Run. Judge me not for my quality, but that I wrote this at all. More here: Writing: A “Dry Run”
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Joe Burrow, the guy we all knew was an amazing QB a year ago…. right?
Last August I passed around a Google form to enter a contest: make some seemingly easy predictions about the NFL season and I’ll venmo some cash to the winner.
Finally, as we’ve all been waiting for… the results are in.
Ok, I’m not sure that many people have been waiting for the results. I forgot about it myself, and we only had 33 entrants. I’m sure they all forgot about it too.
But I was reminded this week by my contest’s predecessor: an NHL prediction contest run by Sean McIndoe (aka DownGoesBrown), a hockey writer at The Athletic. He posted his results roundup under the headline The 2021-22 prediction contest results are in, and you all did terrible (for what it’s worth, I did terrible).
After reading this, I had to look back at this NFL contest and run the numbers. Did the 33 of us do as terrible as the 1,600 entrants in the hockey contest? Honestly, if that other contest is a worthwhile comparison, we had some real talent (or luck) shining through in our small sample. More on that later.
The point of this type of contest is to highlight the chaos and randomness in these leagues. Everyone goes into the season thinking they know what’s going to happen, and by the end of the year they’ve completely forgotten their predictions and how confident they were in the first place. Let’s set it all in stone and show everyone how little they actually know.
<aside> 🔗 If you don’t care about my words (fair) and prefer cold hard data, this spreadsheet is for you.
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I outlined the rules of the contest on a website, nflpredictioncontest.carrd.co (they’re also memorialized in the results spreadsheet). It was heavily based off McIndoe’s contest (ok, a blatant ripoff) and put on with his blessing. He offered some pointers before I finalized the questions, so a big thanks to Sean.
For the nine questions here, you could give up to five answers. You’d earn 1 point for a right answer, 2 points for a second right answer, and so on. Five correct answers (1+2+3+4+5) would earn you the max score of 15 on that question.
But here’s the catch: one wrong answer and you’ll earn zero points for that question. You have to be perfect. Going 4-for-5 is the same as going 0-for-5. You have to decide what level of risk you want to take—is it worth going for all 15 points when it might cause you to completely miss out?
So how many people could see the future and avoid any misses? Not so many, as it turns out.
See how easy these questions might seem?
With an expanded field of 14 teams making the playoffs this past NFL season, you should be able to find five who will obviously make it. The best QBs and coaches were still on the same teams, for the most part. This is simple! But still, more than half of entrants missed our first question.