Sunday 6 November 2011

Remember Remember...

.
November always signifies the quietest time of the year for me and if I wasn't expecting a new arrival in December it would normally be time to get away for a while.  Discipline is called for and experimenting on unfamiliar sports is scaled down.  Playing it a little safer is my normal play when events are sparse.
.
NFL though is one sport that tends to pick up during the month as it contains the national holiday, 'Thanksgiving'.  Along with another excuse to get out the turkey, it also allows the Americans to schedule more gridiron action which is one of the reasons I've really concentrated on the game this year.
.
Naturally, I build my own views from statistics available on sites like NFL.com and ESPN NFL, but it's always good practice to compare my expectations against others and recently I've stumbled across a website and mobile app that allows me to do this for free.
.
Alot of you maybe familiar with this firm already but 'Accuscore' are a self-proclaimed leading sports forecasting company, so who better to match up against?
.
They do offer a fee based service but there's no need to go that far as on both platforms they provide sufficient analysis on the weeks matches without a cost.  For example, here's a snippet from their Jets @ Bills preview for this weekend (click for video):
.
"The Buffalo Bills are a solid favorite with a 62% chance to beat the New York Jets. Fred Jackson is projected for 90 rushing yards and a 51% chance of having at least 1 rushing TD. In the 38% of simulations where New York Jets wins, Mark Sanchez averages 1.31 TD passes vs 0.75 interceptions, while in losses he has a ratio of 0.87 TDs to 1.47 interceptions."   
.
Now I like that type of thing as the write-up is highly specific and over time I'll be able to judge how accurate they are.  In addition, the mobile app is really easy to use and is quite a funky companion although it only features the same information as whats available on their website.  If you prefer other North American sports like Baseball or the NBA then they've got them covered too (at least they do when they're not on lockout).
.
.
Don't get me wrong, this tool is unlikely to make you rich overnight but what it does illustrate, to me at least, is that it's useful to have a quality benchmark to measure yourself against.
.

1 comment:

Mark Iverson said...

The video in this post has now been removed in order to keep bandwidth usage to a minimum.

Thanks

Mark

www.stanjames.com