PREDICTING AGAINST THE SPREAD
I was reading through the editorial detailing some of the things we have said that we would like of the site when I came across Steve Garget’s suggestion that the club run some sort of prediction type competition. This reminded me of the excellent prediction competition run by Clive Williams a couple of seasons ago, together with my experiences of competing in a ‘fan pool’ league last season. Anyway, in accordance with Paul Greenfield amongst others suggestion, I thought it might be a good idea to introduce those of you not already familiar with to the concept of a weekly football picks game against the spread, as run by Clive and via the fan pool website.
OK, so how does all this betting against the spread thing work? Well to be honest, I’m not 100% certain myself. What I do know is that every week during the NFL season and playoffs, someone comes up with a spread for the games to be played that week. This can be thought of as the number of points that one team is expected to beat the other by (that’s the way I think of it anyway). What you then do is to predict whether team A will beat team B by that spread or not. Simple really, isn’t it?
It is a little more interesting than a straightforward prediction competition as you are not only predicting who will win, but also by how much (sort of). The idea is that this makes predicting a little more difficult than a straight prediction. That’s the theory anyway, although with parity working so well most of the time simply predicting who will win will be enough to get a good score (that’s my secret out – D’oh!).
If you are still a little confused (and I can understand that given my description so far), we can put some figures to a recent game that many of you will remember. The game in question took place on January 26th in San Diego and the pundits who generate these spreads predicted that Oakland would beat the Bucs by 3.5 points (show what they know). As we all know, Oakland didn’t beat the Bucs at all and so they failed to cover the spread and everyone who said that Oakland would win lost…
Had Oakland pulled off an upset and beaten the Bucs (shock, horror) by say 3 points, then the same would apply as Oakland still would not have covered the spread. Am I making sense yet? In order for the Raiders to have covered the spread, they would have had to beat us by at least 4 points. Only then would all the Raiders fans who predicted the win be deemed to have got it right. As I said at the beginning of this article, Clive Williams ran one of these competitions a couple of seasons ago and it seemed to go down very well with the club (well I enjoyed it anyway). Last season I was invited to compete in a league on the fan pool website (www.fanpool.com).
This website hosts a number of leagues, some being open to the public and some being private. The public leagues let you turn up and have a go against everyone else, where as the private leagues allow groups to compete against each other. The league I was in, the Chihuahuanuts (don’t ask because I don’t know), was a private league organised by a friend of mine who lives in San Diego. As you can probably imagine, this league had a heavy bias towards Raiders and Chargers fans and being the lone Brit I took great delight in beating the lot of them. Maybe if there is sufficient interest in this type of competition, we can set up a Bucs UK league for next season?
Wayne Hough March 2003
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