2012 NFL Rankings - First Look

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In this recent post, I took a look at the Week 1 opening point spreads for the 2012 NFL season in an effort to get an early read on changes in team strength. In the comments, it was pointed out that Cantor Gaming has published point spreads for the entire 2012 NFL season (except for Week 17). You can find them here (courtesy of beyondthebets.com).

Getting 16 weeks of point spreads is a virtual goldmine for my ranking system, as my rankings developed in-season are based on weekly point spreads that are constantly being re-calibrated to injuries, roster changes, etc.  I think there's a lot of interesting results to tease out of this data set, but for this post, I am focusing on just looking at overall rankings and how they compare to last year.

2012 NFL Opening Lines - An Analysis

The 2012 NFL regular season is still 113 days away, but you can start making bets now. Point spreads for Week 1 of the NFL season are now available, courtesy of Football Locks. The purpose of this post is to review how these point spreads compare to my 2011 NFL point spread rankings. This will give us an early read on who the betting market thinks the off-season winners and losers have been so far.

Here is some background on how the rankings were developed.  The Methodology page also has a simplified example.

For the purpose of this analysis, I am going to use the 2011 Week 16 rankings I published at the Advanced NFL Stats Community site. The table below compares the predicted point spread for each game to the actual point spread. The bar in each row of the table is proportional to the magnitude of the miss and points in the direction of the team that the point spread miss favored (similar to the currently dormant Today's Games feature).  A negative point spread indicates the home team is favored (a convention that has always confused me).

The Ticker - Playoff Edition (updated daily)

The two daily features of this site (Today's Games and The Ticker) were dark for the past week, ever since the NBA regular season ended.

I have now relaunched The Ticker with a focus on the playoffs.  Rather than focus on team rankings and Generic Points Favored (GPF), the focus is now on win probability: the probability that a given team will make it through the first round, the probability that a team will win the NBA championship, etc.


Here is an abbreviated description of the new features (I hope to go into more detail later, time permitting):

Today's Games - going dark temporarily

The Today's Games feature for the NBA will be going dark temporarily.  The default methodology I use doesn't work that well for the playoffs.  However, I hope to launch a playoff version of the Ticker soon (with daily updates), so check back.  I also have MLB versions of the rankings in the works as well that I hope to launch soon (with corresponding Ticker and Today's Games features).

NBA Team Rankings - April 21, 2012

World War I Tank

Here are the NBA Betting Market Team Rankings as of April 21, 2012. These rankings use the Vegas point spreads from recent games to derive an implied measure of team strength (Generic Points Favored, or GPF).  By combining the point spread information with the betting over/unders, I can also decompose team strength into its offensive and defensive components (oGPF and dGPF). For more detail, see the Methodology page.


At this point in the season, it's hard to say exactly what these rankings are telling us. Are the Thunder and Spurs really that much better than the Heat and Bulls?  How much are the point spreads affected by teams resting up for the playoffs?  Are teams that are out of the playoffs "tanking" in the hopes of getting a better lottery pick in the draft?  Or do they simply not try as hard at this point?

NBA Team Rankings - April 14, 2012

Derrick Rose

Here are the NBA Betting Market Team Rankings as of April 14, 2012. These rankings use the Vegas point spreads from recent games to derive an implied measure of team strength (Generic Points Favored, or GPF).  By combining the point spread information with the betting over/unders, I can also decompose team strength into its offensive and defensive components (oGPF and dGPF). For more detail, see the Methodology page.


The Thunder retain the top spot this week.  Both the Celtics and the Hawks moved up in the rankings significantly.  The Hawks, in particular, are an interesting case.  Despite having a top 10 Win/Loss record for most of the season, they were consistently ranked in the 15-20 range according to the point spreads.  And then they jump 3 points in GPF in the course of a week (see for yourself on The Ticker).  It's as if the market suddenly snapped to attention.

The Ticker - Updated Features

I have restructured the Ticker feature of this blog to (hopefully) make the data easier to view and navigate.

• I have separated the various charts into their own pages
• I added a GPF-only graph because I felt that the old format was masking the GPF movement with the additional oGPF and dGPF lines (this old format is still accessible under the "GPF+oGPF+dGPF" link)
• I added a Generic Win Probability (GWP) graph, which just converts the GPF graph into a win probability scale
• The Generic Over/Under (GOU) graph has been split out into its own page
• There is now a link to the rankings in table form, which is updated daily.  It has all the metrics I provide in my weekly blog post of the rankings
• There are placeholders for other sports and prior seasons.  I hope to have those live soon

new version of the Ticker: link
background: original launch