The Favorites Pick ’Em Contest: NFL Week 6 Tiebreaker Strategy
Photo by Harry How/Getty Images. Pictured: Tony Pollard.
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.
In Week 5, a more reasonable 293 entrants swept the board, closer to what we'd expect in a contest of this size. Four of them nailed the tiebreaker question on the nose, accurately predicting that the Raiders' first drive would total 25 yards on Monday Night Football.
We're switching things up a bit for Week 6 (and beyond), allowing for guesses between zero and 600. That should hopefully lead to more solo winners of our $1,500 first-place weekly prize.
Of course, that also means we needed a question that could plausibly fall in that range.
Important note: You can sign up for this contest at any point during the season.
Week 6 Tiebreaker: Total Rushing Yards — Cowboys vs. Chargers Monday Night Football
Given the broader range of possible outcomes and the expected number of 5-for-5 spread winners, this is the time to optimize for accuracy rather than trying to be contrarian. Fortunately, we can come up with a reasonable guess for this prop quite easily.
We'll use both teams' average rushing yards per game on offense and allowed on defense to get us to the best guess on the likely number of total yards. Keep in mind this is the total for both teams combined — a relevant detail because team rushing yards tend to negatively correlate due to game script.
Let's start with the average across all teams and games this season, which is roughly 226 total rushing yards per game, or 113 per team. From there, we'll compare both teams' yards gained and allowed as a proportion of the league average to come up with a base projection for Dallas and L.A.
Dallas is averaging 124.4 rushing yards per game this season, about nine percent above the league average. Los Angeles has allowed 104.3 rushing yards per game, which is about eight percent below league average. While those figures don't account for matchup, it's a reasonable assertion that they've allowed those figures against average teams on the whole.
By multiplying the league average rate by how far above that the Cowboys are AND how far below the Chargers allow, we end up with a projection of roughly 115 yards.
Repeating the process for the Chargers gives us about 131 yards. That's a grand total of 246 yards combined — or about 20 yards above the league total.
My Recommendation: Around 260
I think we should mentally adjust up a bit from that simple projection.
The biggest factor is the return of Austin Ekeler, who's likely to return for the Chargers this week. He's averaged 4.6 yards per carry over his NFL career, and 7.3 in his one healthy game this season. His primary replacement has been Joshua Kelley, who's averaged 3.6 yards per carry, with a career rate of 3.5.
If we assume that difference between their efficiency is sticky (and we should), the Chargers would be averaging roughly an additional 15 yards per game. We could adjust even higher if we then assume the backup work that was handled by Isaiah Spiller (2.8 yards per carry) during Ekeler's absence shifts back to Kelley as well.
Applying both of those adjustments would shift things even higher than the 260-yard range. However, Dallas is favored slightly, so we can assume a higher rush rate for the Cowboys than the Chargers, relative to their average game. With Dallas projected for less total rushing yards, shifting some of the carries from Los Angeles to Dallas based on game script brings the total down a bit.
Therefore, some random number between 250 and 270 would be my selection here, while avoiding round numbers since we still want a unique guess if possible.
While uniqueness isn't as big of a factor as it has been in past weeks, a cluster of shared guesses still reduces your expected value considerably.
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