The 2016 NFL season is just beginning. Wouldn’t you like to know how it will turn out for your New York Giants? There are, of course, a variety of sites that come up with their own formulas to try to predict such things.
It’s all sort of ridiculous, because you can never predict injuries, the crazy bounce of the ball, or other assorted weirdness that can happen in an NFL game. Still, such predictions are fun to look at. So, let’s do that.
Prediction Machine
Using something mysterious that it calls The Predictalator PredictionMachine.com simulates each NFL game 50,000 times. All of that simulation turns out to be good news for the Giants, who end up with a 62 percent chance to make the playoffs. The Predictalator gives only five teams a greater shot at making the playoffs.
Prediction Machine projects the Giants with 9.4 wins, a 52 percent chance of winning the NFC East, a 9.5 percent chance of winning a wild-card berth if they don’t win the division and a 5.7 percent chance of winning the Super Bowl.
The bad news? The simulations have the Giants losing to the Green Bay Packers in the divisional round of the NFC playoffs.
Five Thirty Eight
The stats web site FiveThirtyEight.com uses its proprietary Elo Ratings (explained here) to predict outcomes. Entering the season Five Thirty Eight is not as optimistic about the Giants as the Prediction Machine. Five Thirty Eight gives the Giants just a 32 percent chance of making the playoffs and a one percent chance of being Super Bowl champions.
Go game-by-game through Five Thirty Eight’s Elo projections, and the Giants are headed for an 8-8 season.
Final thoughts
Neither of these really means anything. But, hey, in lieu of a crystal ball it’s what we’ve got.
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