I love computer simulations of sporting events. I love it when they let a Playstation play the Super Bowl 100 times right before the actual game to calculate an average result. I love it when someone, somewhere develops an algorithm that tells me precisely how many yards Felix Jones will rush for this season. These simulations are all useless, mind you. But I like them because I WANT to believe them. I want to believe that an NFL result can be easily and successfully predicted through the use of mathematical formulation. It would make betting so much easier.
The people at What If Sports share my enthusiasm for this sort of thing, which is why they used a simulation engine to predict the exact team-by-team records and playoff results for the entire upcoming 2010 season. How did they configure their simulator? What kind of stats did they weigh? Was DVOA involved? I don’t know. I don’t really care. For all I know, they could have had a monkey wipe banana paste on a series of Bingo cards. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that the computer put your Dallas Cowboys at the top of the NFC East! YEEHAW! WOOHOO! WE’RE HAVIN’ SQUIRREL FOR DINNER TONIGHT!
Here are the projected records for the entire NFC East:
Dallas Cowboys 12-4
Philadelphia Eagles 11-5
New York Giants 8-8
Washington Redskins 8-8
The computer has the Cowboys beating Minnesota in the Wild Card round, then beating New Orleans in the Divisional Playoffs. After that, the computer lets you Cowboys fans down. Dallas loses to Green Bay in the NFC Title game. Then the Packers beat the Chargers in the Super Bowl. It’ll comfort you to know that Peter King predicted this exact same Super Bowl matchup, and Peter King is always hilariously wrong (last year he had the Bears winning the NFC).
Still, I find it alarming that even a computer has jumped onto the “Cowboys winning the division” bandwagon. As August rolls on, you’re gonna see a lot of places putting Dallas at the top of the NFC East and in the Super Bowl. That’s never a good thing. You never want to be the preseason “it” team. So I suggest getting a Sega Genesis, loading up Madden ’96, playing with the Cowboys 700 times and LOSING, and then posting your official results online. You need to balance karma, people. A computer formula told me so.
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