I'm excited to present the inaugural R2 Roy NFL projections!
R2 NFL Roy is a sophisticated statistical system for predicting outcomes of NFL games. R2 Roy uses advanced statistics summarizing prior team performance, team-specific home-field advantage, team-specific away performance, climatic differences for away teams, field surface, and matchup-specific information to predict team performance.
Roy's projections for week 1 diverge pretty significantly from Vegas in some cases. For instance, Roy predicts Buffalo to come to LA for the season opener and unseat the Super Bowl champs. Roy also likes New England to beat the Dolphins in Miami and Seattle to hold on against Denver in Russell Wilson's first game as a Bronco (yikes!).
Here are the full projections:
Week 1 Predictions
Here is how Roy has performed in week one when testing the model on prior seasons. In these tests, the results reported are out-of-sample "projections." This means that only information that was known prior to kickoff was used to develop these estimates.
Prior Week 1 Testing Results
As you can see, Roy has done very well in testing in week 1 when "forecasting" past week 1 outcomes. Here's to hoping that trend continues!
Cheers,
RR