About PicksRecon: How Our Picks and Rankings Work
PicksRecon picks every game in the NFL, college football, the NBA, WNBA and NHL, and men's and women's college basketball and men's college hockey, and fills in every bracket and playoff. Every night we update the scores, schedules and standings, rebuild our rankings and refresh the predictions for every upcoming game. The method is the same in every sport; only the scale changes.
Built by Ryan Jones.
Our rankings: the win network
The rankings on this site are our own. They're computed from game results alone; they aren't the AP poll, the coaches' poll or any other national ranking.
Each game is a link from the loser to the winner, weighted by the final margin, capped so running up the score doesn't help (25 points in basketball, 24 in the NFL, 28 in college football, 3 goals in hockey). A tie is a half-strength link both ways. We rank teams by their centrality in that network, using PageRank, the algorithm behind Google's original search results. A team's score flows to the teams that beat it, so you climb by beating teams that have beaten good teams.
Our rankings use the margin alone: no home field, no preseason opinion, no recency, and only this season's games. Opponents from outside the league (non-D1, FCS teams playing FBS teams) are treated as a single team, so a loss to one still counts.
Common opponents
For any two teams we line up every opponent they've both played. If one team beat a shared opponent by 12 and the other by 3, that's a 9-point edge. Each result is adjusted for home field, and the edges are averaged across every shared opponent. A head-to-head game this season counts as one more comparison.
Efficiency
In basketball: points scored and allowed per 100 possessions, adjusted for each opponent's strength and for home court, plus pace. In football and hockey: points (goals) scored and allowed per game, adjusted the same way. Together they give a projected score.
Early in the season each team starts from last season's final ratings, pulled partway back toward average because rosters change, and counted as only a few games. This season's results take over quickly. That's why there are picks from opening night.
Our pick
Each signal gives a win probability, and our pick blends them. For every league we tuned the blend, home field and the starting points on last season, predicting every game using only what was known the day before. Efficiency carries most of the weight everywhere; common opponents and our rankings add a little.
Predictions for finished games show what we picked before the game, so the ✓ and ✗ marks are an honest record.
The postseason
NCAA basketball and hockey brackets, the College Football Playoff, and the NFL, NBA and NHL playoffs are filled in four ways: by the blend and by each signal alone, using only games played before the postseason began. Before the NFL, NBA and NHL fields are set, they're projected from the current standings. NBA and NHL series show each team's chance to win the best-of-7 and the most likely length. As games are played, each version is scored 10-20-40-80... points per round.