Tuesday, January 03, 2012

Superbowl 46 simulations and predictions

It's time for playoff fantasy football again.  Like previous years, using the data from this season I have simulated the playoff games and generated probabilities of the matchups for the Superbowl and the winners.  It should come as no surprise that the most probable matchup, about 20% of the 100,000 simulations has Green Bay playing New England.  The plot below shows the relative probability by size of bubble with the NFC team winning in blue and the AFC team winning in red

Other NFC teams with a reasonable chance to be in the Superbowl are SF and NO.  On the AFC side it is Baltimore, with perhaps Pittsburgh and Houston as also-rans.

The reason to do the simulation is to see how many games each team plays so that I can choose players who score many points per game and have many chances to do it.  Below is a chart of the expected number of games played for each team.  The best outcomes are when a team without a bye makes it to the Superbowl because then they play four games, in bright green.  More likely is playing three games, in light green.  Obviously I will avoid players on teams that only play one game, in red.


Next  step is to pick players. 


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