Against the Spread Woes: Part 2

This post was written jointly by Michael Lopez (@StatsByLopez) and Gregory J. Matthews (@StatsInTheWild).

In last week’s post, we showed that several of the larger statistically-inclined websites which offer NFL picks have  had a rough go of it to start the season, at least as far as their picks against the spread. More surprisingly, these results come on top of a string of several successful seasons in which each site consistently posted winning (>50%) results.

Today, we dive in to explore why the sites may have fallen behind the 8-ball.

First, we allocated picks from Football Outsiders, numberFire, Team Rankings, and Prediction Machine, four of the websites that we discussed last week. While there are several other competing analytics sites worth mentioning (including Statsational, CFBMatrix, and Massey-Peabody, who have had decent seasons), we stuck with these four because they had readily available for several seasons going…