These are a bit rough since it’s hard to quantify a bunch of stuff that’s bound to happen in week 18.

Motivation is impossible to set a number to. The best you can do is be directionally correct. Drew had a bead on the Kansas City game from two weeks ago vs Tennessee. We weren’t sure how much it was worth, but we had a pretty good feeling the KC effort level would decrease after the elimination.

Player rest, especially the kind that’s being danced around a bit, is tricky as well. The Cowboys are hinting at it, the Eagles are saying it, and there are even rumors that the Chargers may trot out two different backup QBs on Sunday. Advantage: you. You don’t HAVE TO BET the games. Go take up cross-country skiing or cribbage.

I didn’t make any adjustments in my raw numbers for “effort” (if I had, Tennessee would be higher), but did adjust for the Chargers, Eagles, and Packers resting key players.

New Year’s Resolutions for Betting

While it’s been a fantastic year, there’s always room for improvement. In an environment like this one, where your counterparties are also improving, it’s vital. The stupidest thing you’ll read on gambling Twitter is someone saying, “we’re on the same side, it’s us versus the books/Vegas/Jeff Benson.” Don’t kid yourself, the sportsbook operators provide the battlefield, but you’re up against the market as a whole.

I could go on about the fallacy above for ages, but the point remains: get better.

So, a couple that I thought of off the top of my head:

Evaluating Quarterback Play Better

I said I wanted to work on this mid-season, but I just haven’t had the time. Oftentimes, the issue with grading teams or players is a lack of data. This is quite the opposite. How many stupid charts do you see on the daily (often lacking context or improperly using data) to promote the QB that the sender is trying to gloss up? The extreme amount of data surrounding the position is almost a burden, and my number one project this offseason will be backtesting as much as I can to try and contextualize what matters, what doesn’t, how much it matters, and how the hell am I going to separate it from O-Line, Skill position players, and offensive coordinator skill.

Maybe I spend two weeks dinking around with this and don’t actually get anything useful. I’d guess that most data projects end like that.

Spending a little time on Homefield Advantage

This is an easy one; in fact, I’m going to do it first, since knocking something off the list right away will feel nice. This is one that I know will improve the process a bit. I put together a loosey-goosey approach to HFA that was “good enough for now” last year, but never got around to automating and tightening things up. Hat tip to a message in the Discord that reminded me about this.

Evergreen Resolution: More Automation

I’ve come a long way from copy-pasting stats into an Excel document, but it still feels like I’m near the back of the pack when it comes to automating scraping, cleaning, and using data. I’ve had some good luck using Claude and ChatGPT to help figure out the next steps, but I’ve lacked the spare time to really dig in. This will be ongoing and on my list every year from here on out, but if you have any tips or tricks that helped you level up quickly in this area, I’m all ears.

Hopefully, you find peace, happiness, and a few ATS winners in this new year and maybe even a few offseason projects to keep you busy.