I suppose this counts as a visual display of information, right?

Full Rankings

Something I just noticed is that the team with the higher rated quarterback based on RIPPEN won every single game in week 9.  QB rating does a great job too, but it missed one game last week.  Ryan was 102.8 and Romo was 109.3, but Ryan’s Falcons won the game.  This is due entirely to the fact the Romo threw for a touchdown.  Other than that their numbers are nearly identical.  If you take that one touchdown away from Romo, his QB rating would have ben 99.8 with the exact same stats compared to Ryan’s 102.8. Passing touchdowns are so much more about luck and what plays the offensive coordinator is calling.  When evaluating a quarterback, they should probably be largely ignored as is done in RIPPEN.

A full explanation of RIPPEN

Week 9 performances:

RIPPEN through week 9 for the year:

StatsInTheWild NFL rankings as of November 7, 2012 at 12:34pm.  SOS=strength of schedule

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.

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.

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

65.9% reporting and Obama with a 2.1% lead.  

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.