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Dolphins are the best team in the AFC / Harvard Study

Daytona Fin

Daytona Fin

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The Dolphins are getting slightly more buzz than usual this offseason, with an over/under of around 8.5 in various sports books.

They might be a trendy team to make the playoffs but more experts than not have them on the outside looking in.

The big brains at Harvard, however, think the Dolphins are not only the team to beat in the AFC East, but the best team in the entire conference.

Kurt Bullard of the Harvard Sports Analysis Collective — a student-run organization at Harvard University dedicated to the quantitative analysis of sports strategy and management — put together two different advanced formulas to rank the NFL teams most likely to play in to January.

The Dolphins came out third both times, behind only Seattle and Green Bay.

Here’s the formula that was devised, per Bullard:

The biggest challenge obviously is to come up with a sound way to estimate team strength, an endeavor that’s demanding considering the amount of personnel turnover each offseason and the lack of advanced statistics to evaluate player interactions.

The method that I came up with uses Pro Football Reference’s Approximate Value statistic, the site’s best measure of trying to tease out individual talent.

Then, using ESPN’s NFL depth charts, I aggregated each team’s per game approximate value of what I considered to be the “core” makeup of an NFL team: QB, RB, 2 WR, TE, Top 2 OL, the Top-4 “Front Seven” defensive players, and the Top-2 players from the secondary.

To make sure this was a sound method, I tested it out on last year’s data and ran a regression to see if AV was predictive of the end-of-regular season ELO ratings as reported by FiveThirtyEight.
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Bullard then “ran a Monte Carlo simulation of each team’s season, calculating win probabilities based on the ELO ratings using the following formula: 1/(10^(Opponent ELO – ELO)/400)+1). Using Benjamin Morris’ conversion table from wins to playoff odds, I then calculated the odds that a team would make the playoffs for the upcoming year. I then normalized it so an average of 12 teams would make the playoffs every year.”

Again, the Dolphins were third.
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http://dailydolphin.blog.palmbeachp...eam-in-the-afc-according-to-harvard-analysis/

The best part: Bullard so nonchalantly states “the Dolphins may finally dethrone the Patriots in the AFC East, boasting the third-highest probability of playing into January, fifteen percentage points above defending-champion New England.”
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http://harvardsportsanalysis.org/2015/07/a-way-too-early-prediction-of-the-nfl-season/
 
So they couldn't quantitatively factor in the HC and staff???

That makes more sense. We'd have significant point reductions for Philbin and Coyle.
 
That all sounds good until we have the ball with one minute in the game and the only chance of losing is to turn it over to the other team in scoring position and Philby dials up a pass on third and long.
 
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