Football is at the corners again and all kinds of experts are active in making predictions of NFL games recently. So how good are these experts in prediction and how predictable are NFL games? Well, we do not know how well they will do this year, but we can check their records last year.
Let’s take ESPN expert pick as an example. When NFL regular season starts, experts will submit their picks, which will be public viewable, before each week’s games. After all games are played, they will simply be judged as right or wrong in each game.
Each week on ESPN.com, the brain trust of Bristol University convenes and our experts offer their predictions for the upcoming slate of NFL games. A green border indicates a correct answer, and a red border indicates a wrong answer.
“the brain trust of Bristol University” LOL. Anyway, with some nice graphical artwork by ESPN.com, here we can see how ESPN experts did for the first week of 2011-2012 season.
After 17 weeks of regular season games, the total numbers of correct predictions, wrong guesses and expert’s prediction accuracies are:
| Allen | Golic | Hoge | Jaworski | Mortensen | Schefter | Schlereth | Wickersham | |
| Correct | 165 | 161 | 162 | 155 | 155 | 158 | 167 | 167 |
| Wrong | 89 | 95 | 93 | 85 | 101 | 98 | 89 | 89 |
| Accuracy | .65 | .63 | .64 | .65 | .61 | .62 | .65 | .65 |
Since it is hard to find these results on internet now, you got to either trust me (blindly) or request the full data from me (which I’m happy to share). Say you believe the numbers for now, do you think you can pick better than other experts?
You know what, it is legal to bid on NFL games somewhere 
(… to be continued …)
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Your post, “NFL expert picks | Learning From Data” thehollywoodcarshow ended up being worthy of commenting down here in the comment section!
Basically wanted to announce u really did a tremendous work.
Thank you ,Becky
Do you still have that 2011-2012 data? My colleagues and I want to try out some collaborative prediction ideas, and this seems like a great test case. The 2012-2013 data is still posted at espn, but I can’t find the older predictions. Best,
Sean
Sure thing. Send me an email.