Welcome to Week 2 of UNU’s Picks for the 2016-17 NFL season. In case you missed Week 1, UNU pulled off a solid, if not spectacular 7-4 week making bets on NFL games, which we summarized in this blog post. Some of you have asked for more detail about how we arrived at our Week 1 bets. In this post, we will go into a bit more detail on the Week 2 Swarms and how we interpreted, which should shed some light on our process for Week 1.
First a reminder of how this works. Researchers at Unanimous A.I. are gathering groups of regular NFL fans and using UNU to predict game outcomes. They are leveraging UNU’s power as a Swarm Intelligence platform to make smart picks. As you may know, UNU has built up quite a track record for predicting sports. Responding to challenges by journalists, UNU has made surprisingly accurate forecasts for the College Football Bowl Games, the Stanley Cup playoffs, Wimbledon and the Kentucky Derby. Most recently, UNU has turned its attention to perhaps the most fickle of all sports–Major League Baseball–and is absolutely crushing it.
It goes without saying that UNU is not a psychic with a crystal ball. It doesn’t just magically spit out the “right answers” every time. However, when used correctly and interpreted the right way, UNU’s predictions prove to be far more accurate than the average fan, usually beating experts as well, and sometimes even trumping all of them.
On Thursday, researchers assembled a group of 20 regular NFL fans and asked them questions about this week’s games. The questions and multiple choice answers were worded very carefully to try to get the most usable answers. Here’s a sample question regarding Sunday’s matchup between the Baltimore Ravens and Cleveland Browns.
On this question, 17 individuals, represented by the yellow magnets, had little trouble converging on an answer of Baltimore to WIN and COVER the 6.5 point spread (note: all point spreads are subject to change). You can see that there was little support for Cleveland, although a few magnets start off in support of Baltimore to at least WIN, before being pulled up to the higher conviction WIN and COVER position. Breaking it down even further, using UNU Faction Analysis, this pick becomes crystal clear. 33% of the group was pulling toward BAL to at least WIN at the outset, but within a few seconds, it was down to 19%, with BAL to WIN and COVER jumping to 79%. Baltimore against the spread seems like a pretty clear interpretation here.
That being said, most of the questions do not resolve nearly this easily. In many cases, the group doesn’t show enough conviction for such a clear prediction. In these cases, the researchers will sometimes ask a follow-up question to try to tease out a clear answer. Case in point is the Oakland-Miami matchup.
Unlike Baltimore-Cleveland, the group is quite split across several answers. Most notably, 36% started off pulling for OAK to at least WIN, with another 38% pulling for ATL to at least COVER. However, there was a significant faction (18%) pulling toward OAK to WIN and COVER and even 7% who believed that ATL would win outright. By the conclusion, over 60% of the group converged on OAK to at least WIN, but the researchers still had their doubts. So they asked this follow-up question.
WOW. It’s a good thing they asked. In a case like this, where there was significant support for BOTH soft positions (FAV to at least WIN & UNDERDOG to at least COVER), it is important to ask the follow-up question, with less choices. In this case, the follow-up question produced significant conviction for ATL to at least COVER.
Finally, there are some cases where the best guidance is to stay on the sidelines. Although we ask the Swarm about all games, there are certainly cases where there just isn’t clear enough conviction for any answer. In Week 1, there were 5 such games. This week, the Thursday game (Jets at Bills) fell into that category.
In this particular case, even though the Swarm converged on a pick of the Jets to win, the conviction is not clear. Even at the conclusion, there was only 58% support for the Jets to WIN, with significant support still for TOO CLOSE TO CALL. Probably would have been best to sit that one out. Although that said, if you had to bet (as we did in our Pick ’em Pool), Jets was the call–and turned out to be correct.
So with all of that as a massive caveat, here are the results from Thursday’s Swarm. Just click on this image to be taken to the detailed replays.
Obviously, the Swarm replays are just one piece of the puzzle. Lots of this is up to interpretation and debate, especially if you’re going to do something as risky as betting money. That’s it for us, we’re heading to the couch to watch some football….. Swarm on!
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