Betting Market Power Rankings – Conference Finals Edition

by Michael Beuoy

Editor's Note: Michael submitted this earlier this week and I was late in posting it. EA

Here are the final Betting Market Power Rankings of the season, updated with the results of the prior week and the lines for this week. As promised last week, I will also revisit my predictions for the lines and over/unders for the conference final games.

Refer to last week’s post for more detail on the weights used.
Here is a glossary of terms:

LSTWK - The betting market rank as of the prior week
GPF - Stands for Generic Points Favored. It’s what you would expect a team to be favored by against a league average opponent at a neutral site.
oGPF – Offensive Generic Points Favored. The component of a team’s total GPF attributable to its ability to score points.
dGPF – Defensive Generic Points Favored. The component of a team’s total GPF attributable to its ability to prevent the other team from scoring points
O RANK – The team’s oGPF ranking.
D RANK – The team’s dGPF ranking.
GWP - Stands for Generic Win Probability. I converted the GPF into a generic win probability using the following formula: GWP = 1/(1+exp(-GPF/7)).

And here is the ranking table (the Rank column is relative to all 32 teams, but I’m only showing the 12 playoff teams):

Rank	Team	LSTWK	GPF	oGPF	dGPF	GWP	ORank	DRank
1	NO	1	10.0	10.5	-0.5	0.81	1	21
2	NE	3	9.0	8.5	0.5	0.79	2	12
4	GB	2	6.5	6.5	0.0	0.72	3	18
5	NYG	8	4.5	3.5	1.0	0.66	6	9
6	SF	5	4.5	0.0	4.5	0.66	14	2
7	BAL	7	4.5	1.0	3.5	0.66	11	3
8	PIT	6	4.0	-0.5	4.5	0.64	16	1
9	ATL	11	3.5	1.0	2.5	0.62	12	6
11	DET	9	2.5	3.5	-1.0	0.60	5	23
15	TEX	16	0.5	-2.5	3.0	0.52	23	5
18	CIN	19	-1.0	-1.0	0.0	0.47	20	16
24	DEN	24	-4.0	-3.0	-1.0	0.37	25	22

New England is the clear favorite among the field of four.

The remaining three teams all have identical GPF, indicating a competitive matchup in the Superbowl should New England happen to lose this weekend.

Here is how the model predicted the point spreads and over/unders for the two Conference Finals. I’ll show two versions of the predictions. The first is just copied from last week’s post. The second includes one more piece of information, which is how each team performed against the market’s expectation. As noted in my original post on this topic, the market appears to trust the outcome of each game with 15% credibility.

Last Week

Game	Pred Line	ActLine	Diff	Pred OU	Act OU	OU Diff
BAL @ NE	6.5	7.0	0.5	49.0	50.5	1.5
NYG @ SF	3.5	2.5	-1.0	42.0	42.0	0.0

This Week (factors in Divisional Round results)

Game	Pred Line	ActLine	Diff	Pred OU	Act OU	OU Diff
BAL @ NE	7.5	7.0	-0.5	49.0	50.5	1.5
NYG @ SF	2.5	2.5	0.0	42.0	42.0	0.0

Last week’s prediction was fairly close (not as close as Brian’s tweet, but this week’s nudged closer due to the model factoring in the Giants and Patriots beating the market’s expectation by about 25 points and 20 points, respectively. SF also beat expectations, but only by about 7 points, while the Ravens performed as expected by beating the Texans by a touchdown.

Editor's note: The last two tables are a revision from the original post. The tables had been switched in the original version.