Going for Two: Optimized Calculation

After my first post, I began working with my calculation more, then put the numbers into the charts for each week to see how the season might shake out. The results made for a very even distribution of records, with a couple teams having perfect seasons and just as many not getting a win at all. The top two teams, my prospective Super Bowl teams, were the Arizona Cardinals for the NFC and the Miami Dolphins in the AFC.

I mentioned this to two of the people that did my Peer Reviews, and one said, "I will give you $100 if Miami gets to the Super Bowl," but had more optimism about the Cardinals. This prompted me to make more changes. I changed up the numbers that went into the charts for each week by rounding the value to the nearest whole number and added the points from my ranking to the weekly chart through Week 8, but reducing the point value by 10% each week. This rounding and prolonging the effect of those initial points helped by making the final records of each team fall into a more normal distribution. I also hard coded a win for New England to get them from 8&8 to 11&5, because yeah. I may hate the Patriots, but I'm not stupid.

The other major change was to add more data, including Depth Chart Rankings and the ranks for Offenses, Defenses, and Special Teams. This change took considerably more time, both from data entry, figuring out how to weight the different values, and then combining the information into a single number that still fit my 16-point scale. Oh, and I pulled all of that into its own spreadsheet, the apparently simplicity of which masking all of the hours that were poured into it.

This moved the team ranks around, but did not change the Bottom 5 teams. WAS, and JAX made the last of the 20's, and TEN, OAK, and TB received 30, 31, and 32, respectively. New England, Green Bay, and Seattle bounced around a little, but ended up in the top 3. Most of the other top ranked teams from my simpler calculation remained up at the top, but Arizona was the biggest loser, going from number 8 to 16.

Given all the work that I did on my spreadsheet, I'm not about to work on describing it any more, or copy the results into this post. I will say that, after all of that work, Miami still makes it to the Super Bowl.