The Favorites Pick ’Em Contest: NFL Week 4 Tiebreaker Strategy
Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images. Pictured: Brian Daboll.
With the launch of The Favorites' NFL pick 'em contest, which is free to play, we decided on tiebreaker props to settle the winners of the $3,000 in weekly prizes.
Last week, 207 entrants went 5-for-5 on spread picks, with four of those nailing the exact yardage on the longest Bengals touchdown and sharing the fourth-place prize. Seven more entrants were within a yard and shared the fifth-place prize.
It's hard to get the number exactly right, as a 14-yard longest touchdown wasn't appreciably more likely than any other numbers in that range. Obviously a bit of luck is involved in getting it down to the exact number.
For Week 4 we have a fun one — Giants penalty yards on Monday Night Football.
Important note: You can sign up for this contest at any point during the season.
Week 4 Tiebreaker: Giants Penalty Yards
This is an interesting choice for a tiebreaker due to the variety of ways we could go about breaking it down. There's two main factors at play:
- The tendency of the Giants to accrue penalties.
- How many penalties are called by the referee crew.
Before digging into those, let's start with some baseline numbers. Over the past five seasons, the average NFL game had a total of just over 101 penalty yards per game.
It's tempting to divide that number in half for our baseline — but it's not that simple. One of the biggest– if not the biggest — reasons behind home-field advantage is the subconscious impact of the audience on officiating.
We can see that in the NFL data, with visiting teams being called for 52.27% of total penalties over the last five years, and home teams called for 47.73%. The data isn't granular enough to tell us whether penalty yards are more, less or equally biased. For now, we'll assume that it's roughly equal. That gives us a baseline penalty yardage for home teams of 48.3.
Next, we need to decide whether the Giants are likely to have more or less penalties. The sample size of games in 2023 is too small to draw any reasonable conclusions, so we'll look at their data since 2022 — conveniently when head coach Brian Daboll took over. While it's not clear that penalties are a coaching (or coaching staff) stat, there's an argument that they are.
In the 20 regular-season games the Giants have played since 2022, they're averaging 47.25 penalty yards — about 7% lower than the league average. Now we'll look at the referee (Brad Rogers) and his crew.
Rogers and his crews have averaged just under 106 yards of penalties per game over the last five seasons, about 4% higher than average. Notably, they've been even more liberal with the laundry this year, averaging over 140 yards per game — but I wouldn't put much stock into a three-game sample size.
My Recommendation: High 40s
Going through all of the above data, I came up with a mean penalty yards enforced on the Giants of just over 47 for this game. My hunch is that guesses for this one will be all over the place, as it's not as intuitive of a question as something like longest touchdown.
Therefore, we can solve for accuracy rather than leverage this time — depending on how much attention this article gets, of course.
Still, the best option is to be somewhat close to the mean of 47, but plus or minus a few yards in order to have a shot at a unique guess. It probably won't require a perfect answer to cash this week, though first place will probably be exact.
The other option is to register a guess of 100 — the highest possible number allowed. This guess lowers your chances of cashing, but increases your odds of first place. (Again, unless a bunch of people read this and select 100, then the best guess would be 99.)
Unlike past tiebreaker questions, this one could potentially go over 100 — though it's unlikely — making 100 the best guess. That would also likely cash if the actual penalty yards are anywhere above 80 or so, since we can reasonably anticipate most guesses will be well below that.
Those high guesses likely would come down to a deep pass interference call, but that's not all that unlikely. In the 62 games Rogers has refereed, nine of them had a home team called for at least 80 penalty yards, and thrice for at least 100. (Both of those figures also hold true for visiting teams, for what it's worth).
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