Alternative Picks: Week 1, 2020

by Andy | Sep 10, 2020 | 2020 season, NFL Picks

Well, we’re finally here. After one of the weirdest offseasons in history, taking place during one of the weirdest years in history, we’re finally going to have football. At least for now.

I think picking games this year is going to be harder than ever before. We may not know until well after post-time in some situations if, say, for example, Matt Moore will be starting at QB for Kansas City because Patrick Mahomes has the COVID. But throwing darts can be fun. So, WTF. Here we go.

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Adam Rank’s 2019 Predictions Were (Surprise) Not Good

by Tony | Jun 14, 2020 | 2020 season, NFL Picks

I remember seeing all over Reddit last year that fans of lots of teams were upset with Adam Rank’s predictions for their team–the Vikings subreddit in particular, with his 5-11 prediction is the one that sticks out.  With his 2020 predictions hitting the last couple of days, thought it would be a good time to review his picks last year.

Rank’s NFL.com profile notes that he has been “has been giving his irreverent look on the NFL” since 1995, and if you watch the video it’s clear that he’s a Bears fan (going so far as to have someone else walk in the frame to tap the screen handing the Bears a late season loss to the Packers, so he didn’t have to). And to be fair to Rank, he’s putting his game by game predictions out in June–long before training camp injuries and surprise retirements (hi Andrew Luck!), but even with that…his predictions were…not great.

To get his predictions, I fast forwarded through a YouTube video of all of them (will embed it below)…and while I may have missed something, I had him coming up with an aggregate record of 255-257. From my spot checking, he did seem to have the proper cross game selections (ie, he had Pittsburgh losing to Arizona, then he did have Arizona beating Pittsburgh), so maybe I just missed something.

But here were his overall predicitons:

It’s easy to second guess those now, knowing how the season turned out–so let’s just jump straight into the comparison:

I didn’t go through it game by game, but by my count, he got exactly one team’s record correct (the Chiefs, at 12-4), and two playoff seeds correct (the Chiefs and Saints). He did manage to get 15 teams correct on where they would rank in their division–including the entire NFC East. But in total, he missed by a total of 96 games when you take the absolute value of the differences. His worst prediction was the 49ers, who he had at 3-13–they only went 13-3 and represented the NFC in the Super Bowl.

My goal is to put together my own predictions in 2020 (pre-training camp), and see how I do compared to him. I did it once several years ago for fun, and just creating the spreadsheet to make sure you’re not miscounting is a pain–but if anyone else is interested, let me know in the comments below, and I can send you the spreadsheet as well–then maybe we’ll post all of our predictions, and see how many of us can best Adam Rank’s 2020 predictions.

For the record, here’s what I am seeing for his 2020 predictions:

Adam Rank’s 2019 Predictions Video:

Adam Rank’s 2020 Predictions Video