Predictions are finicky. Was picking the Broncos to win against the Chiefs in Week 10 a bad prediction if they lost on a blocked field goal at the end of the game? Moments like this are worth looking back on when, after 272 regular season NFL games, we were just three games apart in game-predicting accuracy. Nick went 168-104 on picks, and Allen went 165-107. We each started 11-5 in Week 1 and had our personal best winning percentage (12-2) in Week 6. In our final, Week 18, predictions, we were three games apart. When game margins are often so thin, can you crown a definitively superior prognosticator; when a Vikings-Rams game ends on a blatant no-call face mask; when a Bears-Commanders game ends with a fluke Hail Mary success on a ball that did not even make it to the endzone?
We set out in September hoping to find a clear answer to the question of whose knowledge and instincts about the NFL were sharper, committing to a fairly low-tech but robust approach: We handwrote out each week’s schedule on scraps of printer paper, circled our predicted winning teams and highlighted the correct picks from Sunday afternoon to Monday night. The results were displayed on one of our living room walls for any of our house guests to see, even the bad weeks. After months of action, the completion of the 2024 NFL season calls for some reflection.
Allen’s section
I do not know ball. The time I invested in the NFL this season was nothing impressive. At best, I watched box scores, followed many deceivingly concise—yet frequently informative—media narratives and kept up to date with notable trades or injuries. My Patriots made me sigh. I picked the Ravens every single week.
And despite all of this amateur fandom alongside a serious lack of RedZone watching, I came out the other side with a decent winning record, although I was ultimately bested by Nick. Overall, I was a bit more invested in the NFL’s general happenings than usual. However, I personally feel that my result is not singularly impressive with recent history in mind. Save for the Washington Commanders or Minnesota Vikings, few franchises had notable turnarounds or completely fell apart, making 2023 a reliable index for this year’s regular season predictions.
Still, I was surprised—and let down—by some season-long performances in particular. Although I felt both groups would be somewhat competitive, the Eagles and the Bills each put together impressive regular seasons after much off-season chatter from doubtful viewers, including myself. The former’s slow start especially deceived me, involving early losses to the Falcons and the Buccaneers that I failed to predict, alongside closer-than-expected contests with the Saints and the Browns. Correcting my Eagles picks across Weeks 1 through 8 would have been enough to tie Nick, had I anticipated their trajectory better.
On the flip side, the Saints hot start had me convinced they could be legit, which they obviously never were. Derek Carr deceived me. Saints over Eagles was one disgusting and costly blunder.
In the AFC, The Steelers became Nick’s rock, often netting him crucial points in weeks where I had picked against them. My Steelers-related misses in Weeks 1 through 10 also cost me the competition. I could never trust their quarterback situation; this hesitation finally benefitted me in the closing weeks of the season.
The NFC West consistently confused me. Whenever I was high on a roster over there, fortunes quickly flip-flopped. The 8-9 up-and-down Cardinals especially peeved me. It felt as if anytime I picked against them, they won, and vice versa. Predictions created bizarre yet consistent enemies. I likewise cursed the Texans, led by quarterback C.J. Stroud.
Circling back to the Super Bowl teams, I (incorrectly) picked three semi-upsets against the Chiefs during the first half of the regular season, assuming that their close-win strategies would soon be punished; this hardly happened until the Super Bowl. Again, these isolated situations were enough to lose the entire season, a devastating realization I had while writing this article. Cumulatively going 11-21 during Weeks 2 through 3 did not help either.
Nick’s section
In more recent years, I have been fairly invested in the NFL with my team, the Buffalo Bills, being a legitimately talented, fun-to-watch franchise. That investment naturally extended to the entire league. Unlike Allen, I am a fairly consistent viewer of sports talk shows, most notably the boisterous “First Things First” and the arrogant “The Herd with Colin Cowherd.”
While these were good reference points for making picks, a lot of the takes in sports media are just bad. Entertaining, but bad. I started using ESPN’s set of no-frills “expert” picks on their website late in the year—a set of 11 sports media people who just pick winners each week. Looking at those helped me pick in context, and ultimately avoid missing on picks that were far more lopsided than I realized.
At the end of the season, I skimmed through the weeks to see if either of us had picked right on any game that all 11 ESPN prognosticators had called wrong on. I picked three: Broncos over Jets in Week 2, Rams over 49ers in Week 3 and Broncos over Jets in Week 4. Allen picked none. You could really point to any three-game stretch as the reason that I ended the season at a higher record than my colleague Allen, but these picks are the ones I am most proud of. It is not unsurprising that they all occurred early-season. This is the time of year when the pecking order is in flux and bold picks are more often rewarded. Not relying on ESPN at the time of year was maybe even advantageous.
At my best, I was picking the Steelers to win without fail for the first 12 weeks, when they were rattling off surprise win after surprise win with a below-average quarterback room. Mike Tomlin can just make magic happen in the regular season. Outside of the Bills, this was probably the team I favored the most throughout the season. At my worst, I was picking against the Chiefs, thinking they were in a trap game practically every week and, inversely, picking the Browns to win three weeks in a row late in the season—you can imagine how the Chiefs vs. Browns game went for me.
Allen and I are not dissimilar prognosticators overall. We typically always picked against the Patriots, picked the Baker Mayfield-Bucs in toss-up spots, and were skeptical of the Aaron Rodgers-Jets experiment. For many weeks, our records were identical, which is not surprising given our similarities: many games, we just picked the same. There were only two options, after all. The result of those games was inherently less interesting. The games each week kind of played out like states in the electoral college: most do not matter, but the ones that do, definitely matter. On a good week, the deciding game for who had the better record was late in the week, either Sunday or Monday Night Football. This ended up being the case fairly often with those being particularly tight match-ups between good teams.
I will say that not all of the picks felt particularly compelling to make, even when we did disagree. There were match-ups that I was never intrigued by but seemed to appear in some form at least once every week: the Raiders, Titans, Jaguars, Saints, or Panthers facing one another. I could not care less. They were all awful this year. If you ever root for a tragically bad sports team and wonder “Gee what do the other sports fans think about us?” just know that your team never crosses my mind.
At the end of the regular season, I was two wins behind the worst ESPN expert, which feels like a nice victory. On the other hand, I was 32 wins behind the best. I know some ball, but I am far from a self-proclaimed expert. Give me a few years though—maybe you will see on the experts page for 2038.
The playoffs
The playoffs were an entirely separate picks system from the rest of the season. The picks fatigue had worn in by Week 13, so we went with March-Madness-style brackets for the playoffs, knocking the rest of the season in one go.
Picking a regular season game-winner right is not hard, but picking the right Super Bowl champion is tricky and requires some legitimate thinking, so it helped to have tracked the regular season so meticulously. Of course, both of our brackets were pretty off by the end of the postseason. I (Nick) took the Bills against the Lions for the final, and Allen took the Ravens and Lions, neatly mirroring our regular season biases. Brackets are a format where being wildly off is pretty common, but after having predicted the entire season, it still sucked to be so off about the Super Bowl matchup, especially with the Lions not passing the divisional round.
When it came around to Super Bowl Sunday, we made an informal prediction about who would win: the Chiefs, definitively. We then watched them lose, definitively. After months of scrutiny, we still sorely misunderstood the NFL.
Conclusion
It might seem like this exercise was some sort of strange gateway into sports betting, which neither of us ended up doing. Sports betting is similarly compelling though in that there is a record attached to the prediction: In the case of betting, money is lost or won. For us, it was just pieces of paper with numbers on them. Sports betting brings predictions, however insidiously, beyond vacuous chatter. A better comparison for our scheme is “Inside the NBA’s” post-it notes segment, which is hilarious in its minuteness. The Inside Guys squirm as Ernie Johnson reads aloud their off-base predictions written on tiny sticky notes. All of this to say: It does not take large sums of money to feel the sting of being wrong.