The Chicago Bears are not good at football. Despite a 11-6 record and the 2 seed in their conference playoff, they struggle in the underlying, predictive metrics. Let’s break this down.
My team rankings take margin of victory in games and adjust for opposition with my mathematical algorithms. These were the very first calculations at The Power Rank over a decade ago.
Chicago ranks 18th, and they are rated worse than the average NFL team. Only Carolina with their 8-9 record has a lower rating among playoff teams.
Over the years, my methods at The Power Rank have improved. However, these calculations only dislike Chicago more. For example, consider success rate on passing plays. For an offense, a play is a success if it gains the following fraction of yards towards the next first down:
- 50% on 1st down.
- 70% on 2nd down.
- 100% on 3rd, 4th down.
For NFL quarterbacks, passing success rate is the most predictive statistics that I’ve found. I take these raw numbers for each QB and adjust for opposing defenses.
For the season, Caleb Williams is expected to have a 40.9% passing success rate against an average defense. This is worse than the 42.6% NFL average. On defense, Chicago ranks 27th out of 32 teams and has been awful.
With a young quarterback, one might expect improvement over the second half of the season. In fact, Williams had a big game against San Francisco in which the offense couldn’t be stopped.
When I look at Williams’s performance in the last 8 games, his expected passing success rate is 41.9%, better than his season long numbers but not as good as NFL average. Remember, my algorithms will adjust for how bad the San Francisco defense has been this season.
Green Bay will get QB Jordan Love back after missing a game with a concussion and then sitting him last week with no incentive to win. In my adjusted numbers, Love is expected to have a 46.5% passing success rate, another level of performance compared to Williams.
Overall, my member numbers use a combination of play by play and market data to make the most accurate possible spread predictions. This model predicts Green Bay by 2.0 on the road.
The markets favored Chicago at home earlier in the week but have settled on the Packers as a 1, 1.5 point favorite in agreement with my numbers. Chicago is not a good football team, but their home advantage is part of why they have a 44% chance to win this game.
Here is a sample of predictions usually saved for paying members of The Power Rank:
NFL: Buffalo will beat Jacksonville by 1.6 points on the road. I was surprised that the spread did not favor Buffalo by more but Jacksonville has surged in the second half of the season.
NFL: New England will beat the Los Angeles Chargers by 4.7 points at home. In my adjusted passing success rate numbers, New England QB Drake Maye has almost been as good as Matt Stafford.
Smarter sports betting in less than 5 minutes
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