Back Home Again

"Hey it's good to be back home again. Sometimes this old farm feels like a long lost friend"  --John Denver

Mr. Bluebird On My Shoulder may have been full of shit in the eyes of Harry and Lloyd, but I feel I know exactly what he was saying as I sit down for the first time and pound out a new year of heavy-in-the-beginning-before-slowly-trailing-off-to-no-activity-at-all blog posts. I don't know if I feel it towards this blog or if it's solely the return of football, but it suddenly feels like everything is about to be right in the world once again.

We had a spirited, albeit late, start to this last year and still couldn't seem to get ourselves off the ground enough to make posting our opinions a regular thing. But I have a feeling this year could be different for the following reasons:

1.) As the main contributor up to this point, my amount of time at home has increased exponentially
2.) I'm tired of restarting this thing every 11 months
3.) Through hours of research and number crunching, I've created a system this year to measure teams which means I'm going to want to measure the system

The third reason is the key because it's what's going to drive all of my posts concerning both College and NFL football for the rest of the season. By taking an aggregate of a select group of Power Rankings systems available, I've developed the SHARPsquares rankings that will be recreationally used against the spread this year. I'm not trying to make any money off of this. I'm not trying to market it to anyone. I'm not claiming I came up with any of the raw data necessary to build it.

What I'm trying to do for once in my life is use a system that helps point me in the right direction of potential value while simultaneously keeping me away from games that Vegas already has surrounded. Additionally, I want something that will force me to be more disciplined than I've been in past years, picking games simply because it's the only thing on and/or it's the biggest game of the week and I really wanted to watch it anyway. I recently read a quote in a preseason magazine that said it's much better to go 4-1 in a weekend, than 14-11. After thinking more about it, I realized you'd have to go 15-11 just to match the performance of a 4-1 weekend. That's 21 more games!

What this also made me realize is that my eagerness to have a horse in the race and penchant for picking bad horses was not the only reason I was unsuccessful. In order to be break even, you have to hit at a 52.4% clip. Of the 67 systems linked on Todd Beck's The Prediction Tracker (the crux of my research the last 4 weeks and an innovation I'm guessing a lot of people don't realize exists), only 9 systems hit at this clip. That's less than 14%. These were systems developed by experts in cahoots with bright minds with strong computers and less than 14% could even pull off a small profit.

So here's what I thought: If each of those systems individually can't pull it off, what could the average of a select group of those systems look like over the course of a season? And that's how we arrived at the SHARPsquares rankings. We've tinkered with some of the calculations to arrive at an average, but we feel we have one of the best representations on the Internet of readily-available power rankings combined into one aggregate system.

Now, I would be lying if I said I'm willing to blindly wander off into the night with my macro-enabled Excel program. I still believe that I know SOMETHING about this sport, it's just that I've only now convinced myself that I know EVERYTHING about this sport. There will still be homer picks centered around UK as early as Week 1 and probably all the way through their bowl game - need proof I'm a homer now? There will still be games I select that the system does not point out at all. I will still miss A LOT of picks. Those things I can promise you.

So the format of each post will be a bit different for my picks for the week. I'll first highlight the games my gut said something about, which will usually be the marquee games of the week, SEC games, UK games, or games that I feel I've picked up an angle on throughout the season because of information or observation. I'll also be highlighting the games that the system shows a large enough discrepancy between the updated line and system's line. Finally, I'll make my picks based on some combination or outweighing factor of one over the other. As an added feature, I'll be ranking my selections based on how many units they're worth, with the games with the highest units representing the games I have the most confidence in. I'm defining a unit as the smallest amount you would theoretically wager on any game, up to the max amount you would wager being my highest 5-unit pick.

My Gut, My Computer, My Picks. My GCP. Every week. From here until the Super Bowl.

Season Record ATS: 0-0 (0-0 NCAAF, 0-0 NFL), +0 Units
Season Record ML: 0-0 (0-0 NCAAF, 0-0 NFL), +0 Units

DISCLAIMER: WE DO NOT CONDONE GAMBLING OF ANY KIND AND YOU SHOULD NOT USE THIS SITE TO ACTUALLY SELECT SPREADS YOU'LL WAGER REAL MONEY ON. THAT'S GROCERIES FOR YOUR FAMILY AND I REFUSE TO HAVE ANY OF THAT ON THE SHOULDERS OF A STUPID SPREADSHEET I MADE. THIS IS STRICTLY FOR FUN AND SO (ASSUMING THE INTERNET STILL EXISTS IN 10 YEARS) WE CAN ALL LOOK BACK AND LAUGH AT OURSELVES.