Why Did A Thursday Team Move Up In The Pick Rankings After Winning?
The Thursday Night Football game presents challenges. Once the game has been played, it can have a big impact on EV for other choices.
The NFL usually schedules one game for Thursday night, which means that usually two teams play three days before all the rest.
That’s been a difficult thing to try to account for when building our Survivor tools. Consider the tradeoffs:
- If we lock all the data at the start of the Thursday game, then several days worth of breaking news, betting line changes and pick popularity changes for the Sunday and Monday games won’t get taken into account. Customers whose picks aren’t due until Saturday or Sunday morning will therefore be at a significant information disadvantage.
- If we don’t lock all the data on Thursday, it enables the result of the Thursday night game to change the pick rankings substantially, which it sometimes should. (Explanation below)
We’ve settled on the following solution: we lock data for the two teams that play on Thursday before the kickoff of the Thursday night game, but we don’t lock data on Thursday night for teams playing later in the week.
We do our best to help people understand what could happen in the pick rankings as a result. For example, the most common question we get:
“Team X was not the top pick for my pool on Thursday afternoon. Then they won on Thursday night, and now on Friday they are showing as the top pick for my pool! What’s going on?”
We understand why this seems suspect. It might seem like we’re trying to retroactively say that we recommended that Thursday team, even though they weren’t actually ranked at the top of the list before the Thursday game kicked off.
But what really happened is that the Thursday game outcome impacted the outlook and ratings for the other teams who haven’t played yet.
Specifically, when a popular team (like the Bengals in 2016 Week 4) wins on a Thursday, the prospects for picking any other team that week get worse.
Even if you pick another team in Week 4 and that team ends up winning, there is zero chance that the significant percentage of people who already picked the Bengals will get knocked out as the result of an upset.
To explain in more detail exactly what’s happening with the numbers:
Before the kickoff of the Thursday night game, we lock the data for the teams playing on Thursday, but we continue to update the data for other teams.
Our Win% estimate and Immediate EV estimates for the Thursday teams freeze at kickoff on Thursday, but those values can still change for teams playing on Sunday. As a result, we always show the most up to date data for a team until the Sunday games kick off, but we also don’t change any data for a team after a game starts.
When a popular Thursday team wins, that lowers the Immediate EV of teams playing later in the week.
If you’re not familiar with Immediate EV, please check out our article called What Is Immediate EV (Expected Value) linked in the right sidebar. As a reminder, Immediate EV measures the expected value of picking a specific team in the current week, ignoring future weeks.
That expected value depends on two things: how likely a team is to win, and how many opponents are expected to survive the week. The more opponents that are expected to survive the week, the lower a team’s Immediate EV is, because your expected share of the prize pool is split among more people.
When a popular team wins on Thursday, we now know that all the people picking that team survived the week, whereas before the game there was some chance they would lose. This increases the expected number of surviving opponents for all the teams playing later in the week, and lowers their Immediate EV.
The Thursday team’s Immediate EV stays the same, because we locked it.
As mentioned above, the Immediate EV values for the Thursday teams are frozen before kickoff. (And if they weren’t, the Immediate EV for the Thursday night winner would actually go up after the game, since that team’s win odds would now be 100%.)
Because the Thursday team’s Immediate EV stays the same, while other teams’ Immediate EV goes down, the Thursday team can rise in the rankings. But what’s really happening is the other teams’ underlying pick grades are falling, while the Thursday team’s underlying grade has stayed the same.
This is definitely somewhat confusing, but we haven’t yet figured out a better solution. (If you have a suggestion — other than hiding the Thursday teams in the pick rankings table after the Thursday night game, which we don’t think makes sense — we’re all ears.)
What’s most important to understand is that the result of the Thursday game can change the relative rankings of teams playing later in the week. Primarily, if a popular team wins Thursday, then just surviving the week becomes more important, and avoiding popular teams becomes less important. Imagine if everyone in your pool except you picked the Thursday night winner; at that point, survivor strategy be damned, you’d just want to pick the safest possible team you could in the Sunday/Monday games.
So we have to take into account the Thursday result, or else we’re not making the best suggestions possible for the teams playing later in the week. And if we take into account the Thursday result for teams playing on Sunday or Monday, then those teams do grade relatively worse than they did previously, because we now know that the Thursday team has 100% win odds.
We agree that it’s not ideal for Thursday teams to move up the rankings after a win; the “optics” of it can look a bit shady if you don’t understand the reasons behind the move, which simply have to do with data calculations changing.
However, the point of these rankings is to show you the relative rankings of the teams this week, given everything we know at the given time. And sometimes, teams playing later in the week look worse after the Thursday game result.
From a practical standpoint, you should simply continue to use the rankings as intended — by picking the best teams in the pick rankings that you’re still able to pick, when it comes time to make your picks.
If you check the system on Thursday afternoon and none of the Thursday night teams are ranked highly enough to be a consideration for you, don’t play them. If you check back on Friday or Saturday and see one of the Thursday teams all of a sudden ranked a lot higher, it’s water under the bridge at that point. That team won, so it’s now grading out higher in comparison to the Sunday and Monday teams who still could lose.
At that point, just as you skip over teams in the pick rankings that you’ve already used, also skip over teams that have already played.