Three Years of NFL Preseason Picks, +0.1 Units. Here’s Why We Still Post Them.
Here are our NFL preseason numbers, all of them, before you read another word.
- 2023: 9-10, down 1.4 units
- 2024: 10-7, up 1.2 units
- 2025: 9-7, up 0.3 units
- Three years: 28-24, up 0.1 units
Fifty-two picks. Three preseasons. One tenth of a unit. That is not a brag. That is a rounding error, and it is exactly the point.
The formula doesn't work in August
Our model is built to project how games actually get played. It works in the NFL regular season. It works in college football. It works in the other sports we cover. It does not work in the preseason, and we are not going to pretend otherwise to sell you something.
The reason is simple: preseason coaches are not trying to win the game. They are trying to get through it.
We are not going to open up the recipe here, but the biggest inputs we lose are the ones tied to play calling and substitution patterns, and those two things drive our projected scoring more than anything else. In the regular season, the end of a game is the most predictable part of it. Teams behave in ways you can model. A team down six with two minutes left...