2010-01-15: Divisional Playoffs

Dallas has really taken off and seems to be peaking at just the right time. The Cowboys decimated the Eagles for a second time and they almost made it look easy. While our research seems to indicate that teams with good offensive passing generally do better, the recent Dallas surge lends credence to the old saw about the run game. According to our numbers Dallas has the best run offense this year and close to the best run defense. The Dallas pass statistics are not that bad but they are overshadowed by the likes of New Orleans and the Colts.

The Colts bring up an issue that I alluded to last week that I had to deal with before running this weeks algorithms. Because Indianapolis sat their starters for the past few weeks I need to decide whether or not to exclude those weeks from the calculations. If I include weeks 16 and 17 for Indy then Baltimore comes out as the predicted winner. However if I ignore those weeks then the Colts are the pick.

We felt that that those two weeks are not indicative of the true performance of the Colts during the playoffs so we dropped Indianapolis's performance numbers for those weeks and ran the algorithms and this is what we came up with.

Home	Visitor	SVM	Pagerank	Vote
NO	ARI	NO	NO	NO
IND	BAL	IND	IND	IND
MIN	DAL	DAL	DAL	MIN
NYJ	SD	SD	SD	SD

--Greg Szalkowski