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NFL Rankings – 11/7/2012
StatsInTheWild NFL rankings as of November 7, 2012 at 12:34pm. SOS=strength of schedule
| Team | Rank | Change | Record | Projected Record | ESPN | TeamRankings.com | SOS | Points Diff |
| Chicago | 1 | ↑1 | 7-1 | 12-4 | 3 | 1 | 8 | +116 |
| Houston | 2 | ↓1 | 7-1 | 12-4 | 2 | 3 | 16 | +100 |
| Atlanta | 3 | ↑2 | 8-0 | 13-3 | 1 | 2 | 25 | +77 |
| Green Bay | 4 | ↑2 | 6-3 | 10-6 | 6 | 4 | 5 | +52 |
| SF | 5 | ↓1 | 6-2 | 11-5 | 4 | 5 | 7 | +86 |
| NE | 6 | ↓2 | 5-3 | 10-6 | 9 | 7 | 14 | +92 |
| NY Giants | 7 | – | 6-3 | 10-6 | 5 | 8 | 22 | +69 |
| Denver | 8 | ↑1 | 5-3 | 11-5 | 8 | 6 | 26 | +60 |
| Seattle | 9 | ↑3 | 5-4 | 9-7 | 12 | 11 | 6 | +16 |
| Baltimore | 10 | ↑1 | 6-2 | 11-5 | 7 | 10 | 27 | +23 |
| Minnesota | 11 | ↓3 | 5-4 | 8-8 | 16 | 20 | 4 | +7 |
| Detroit | 12 | ↑2 | 4-4 | 7-9 | 14 | 13 | 2 | +4 |
| Miami | 13 | ↓3 | 4-4 | 8-8 | 15 | 15 | 19 | +21 |
| Tampa Bay | 14 | ↑2 | 4-4 | 8-8 | 13 | 16 | 23 | +41 |
| Pittsburgh | 15 | – | 5-3 | 10-6 | 10 | 9 | 32 | +27 |
| Arizona | 16 | ↓3 | 4-5 | 7-9 | 20 | 23 | 1 | -29 |
| St. Louis | 17 | – | 3-5 | 7-9 | 24 | 21 | 3 | -49 |
| Indianapolis | 18 | ↑2 | 5-3 | 9-7 | 11 | 12 | 20 | -32 |
| San Diego | 19 | ↑3 | 4-4 | 8-8 | 17 | 26 | 31 | +28 |
| Dallas | 20 | ↓2 | 3-5 | 7-9 | 18 | 14 | 15 | -31 |
| NY Jets | 21 | ↓2 | 3-5 | 7-9 | 25 | 18 | 11 | -32 |
| NO | 22 | ↑4 | 3-5 | 6-10 | 22 | 17 | 12 | -11 |
| Carolina | 23 | ↑4 | 2-6 | 6-10 | 29 | 19 | 13 | -31 |
| Washington | 24 | ↓3 | 3-6 | 6-10 | 19 | 24 | 21 | -22 |
| Buffalo | 25 | ↓2 | 3-5 | 6-10 | 28 | 27 | 17 | -68 |
| Cincinnati | 26 | ↓1 | 3-5 | 7-9 | 23 | 29 | 30 | -29 |
| Philadelphia | 27 | ↓3 | 3-5 | 6-10 | 21 | 25 | 18 | -50 |
| Oakland | 28 | – | 3-5 | 6-10 | 26 | 28 | 29 | -58 |
| Tennessee | 29 | – | 3-6 | 6-10 | 27 | 22 | 9 | -126 |
| Cleveland | 30 | – | 2-7 | 5-11 | 30 | 30 | 28 | -42 |
| Jacksonville | 31 | – | 1-7 | 4-12 | 31 | 31 | 10 | -102 |
| Kansas City | 32 | – | 1-7 | 3-13 | 32 | 32 | 24 | -107 |
Best
Best team in the league: Chicago
Best undefeated team: Atlanta
Best 7 win team: Chicago
Best 6 win team: Green Bay
Best 5 win team: New England
Best 4 win team: Detroit
Best 3 win team: St. Louis
Best 2 win team: Carolina
Best 1 win team: Jacksonville
Worst
Worst 7 win team: Houston
Worst 6 win team: Baltimore
Worst 5 win team: Indianapolis
Worst 4 win team: San Diego
Worst 3 win team: Tennessee
Worst 2 win team: Cleveland
Worst 1 win team: Kansas City
Worst team in the league: Kansas City
Most
Most under-rated team: (#17) St. Louis (ESPN has them 24)
Most over-rated team: (#18) Indianapolis (ESPN has them 11)
Cheers.
Nate Silver is the MC Hammer of Statistics
From this Gawker.com article:
Okay, clearly the guy [Silver] is good with numbers, but all the praise seems kind of overboard.
Well, look, you can see his record for yourself: 50 for 50. But it’s true, Silver’s getting a lot of credit for calling Obama’s victory when basically any statistician or political scientist who’s been following the race made the exact same call — and in fact, some of those statisticians and political scientists have criticized Silver’s model for being opaque and overcomplicated.
And it’s very easy to miss the forest for the trees, and lionize Silver the individual writer instead of a broad push for data-driven analysis in political journalism. After Silver’s great showing on Tuesday, it’d be easy for political horserace journalists to co-opt him and treat him as a unique oracle, instead of understanding that it’s the statistical approach that made him — and Linzer, Wang, Simon Jackman, Mark Blumenthal and others — handicap the election so perfectly.
But on the other hand, Silver is by far the most visible of the new breed of “quant” political writers by virtue of his spot at the Times, and by a long shot the one who’s attracted the most, and widest array, of haters. (Hi.) If people overpraise him for making what was, based on the numbers, an easy call on Election Day, it’s only because he’s been over-criticized for it all year.
Let me re-iterate that I am a Nate Silver fan, but I dont think he’s a genius. Well, not in the traditional sense. He does good work, but plenty of people called this election correctly. Gawker names just a few: Linzer, Wang, Simon Jackman, Mark Blumenthal. So, it’s not just that Silver got the election correct. It’s something else. Silver’s real skill, in my mind, is that not only does he do adequate statistical analysis, but he’s also able to get people to pay attention to him (and getting people to pay him). Silver’s not doing anything ground-breaking, but he has brought statistical analysis to the mainstream. He’s just better at marketing himself than almost everyone else in the field. He’s sort of like MC Hammer in the 1990s: Hammer wasn’t the first to rap and wasn’t the most talented, but his 1990 album was the first to get to number #1 and sold something like 18 million copies. (And, more importantly, both Hammer and Silver have baseball backgrounds). Hammer brought rap to the mainstream; Silver brought numbers.
What Silver has done is take statistics out of cluttered offices filled with computers chugging away crunching numbers and brought it to mainstream America. And he’s cashing in like no one ever has before him. And for that he IS a genius.
Cheers.
Obama’s big win does not mean Nate Silver is a towering electoral genius
But all these stats triumphalists have it wrong. Nate Silver didn’t nail it; the pollsters did. The vaunted Silver “picks”—the ones that scored a perfect record on Election Day—were derived from averaged state-wide data. According to the final tallies from FiveThirtyEight, Obama led by 1.3 points in Virginia, 3.6 in Ohio, 3.6 in Nevada, and 1.9 in Colorado. He won all those states, just like he won every other state in which he’d led in averaged, state-wide polls. That doesn’t mean that Silver’s magic model works. It means that polling works, assuming that its methodology is sound, and that it’s done repeatedly. –Daniel Engber on Slate
A lead and no chance
Right now, Romney is leading by over 1.5 million votes in the popular vote and is up by 17 in the electoral college, and he has virtually no chance to win the election. 
What should we expect from Silver?
Silver’s predictions for each state are made in terms of probabilities. So, sometimes he’ll get those right and other he’ll get wrong totally based on random chance. But how much should we expect from him? Should we expect him to get every single one of his predictions correct?
Let’s assume that the probabilities he reports are 100% accurate (that’s a huge assumption, but I’m doing it) and we simulate the election thousands of times. Based on these simulations, how many of Silver’s predictions do we expect him to get wrong.
Using Silver’s 56 state presidential win probabilities from last Friday, we can consider Silver’s prediction in each state to be the candidate who has the higher probability. Now, taking those same probabilities, we can simulate an election based on those probabilities and compare those to Silver predictions. Now, we can run this simulation thousands of times, and count how many times Silver’s predictions are expected to be wrong. According to these simulations Silver is expected to get every one correct only about 5% of the time based on his probabilities if this election was run many, many times. So it’s very likely that he gets at least one state wrong. It’s to be expected. At the other end of the spectrum, there is only about a 1.6% chance that Silver gets more than 5 states wrong.
This means we should expect that Silver , about 93.4% of the time, will get somewhere between 1 and 5 states incorrect. 55% of the simulations, more than half, have Silver getting either 2 or 3 states incorrect, and the average number of incorrect predictions in my simulations was 2.4522.
So, what should we expect from Silver? We should expect him to miss at least one state, and most likely to miss 2 or 3 states.
Cheers.
Merlin Miller vs Roseanne Barr
Merlin Miller is currently beating Roseanne Barr in presidential voting. 
Stats in the Wild 
