wildbill@ucbvax.ARPA (William J. Laubenheimer) (10/25/84)
As promised, here is the halftime report on the First Annual USENET
Pro Football Poll.
To begin with, I applied what I believe to be the official NFL rules
for breaking ties, a procedure only slightly less complicated than
the automatic conversion rules of PL/1. This gave the following set of
placings:
St. Louis has beaten both Washington and Dallas, and so is NFC East leader.
Washington has beaten division opponent Dallas, and so is first wild-card
in NFC East. Dallas has beaten the Rams, and so is second wild-card.
Denver has beaten the Raiders, and so is AFC West leader. The Jets are
6-2 in conference play, while Seattle is 3-2, so the Jets are second wild-card.
I then doubled all the records to provide a 16-game total for comparison
to produce the chart below. Division leaders are at the top, and playoff
teams if the playoffs began now are those teams above the blank lines.
NFC
East Central West
St. Louis 10- 6 Chicago 10- 6 San Francisco 14- 2
Washington 10- 6
Dallas 10- 6 Tampa Bay 6-10 L.A. Rams 10- 6
Detroit 6-10 Atlanta 6-10
N.Y. Giants 8- 8 Minnesota 4-12 New Orleans 6-10
Philadelphia 8- 8 Green Bay 2-14
AFC
East Central West
Miami 16- 0 Pittsburgh 8- 8 Denver 14- 2
N.Y. Jets 12- 4 L.A. Raiders 14- 2
Cincinnati 4-12
New England 10- 6 Cleveland 2-14 Seattle 12- 4
Indianapolis 6-10 Houston 0-16 San Diego 8- 8
Buffalo 0-16 Kansas City 8- 8
OK, now for the standings. The scoring is divided into "Picks" (20 for
correctly picking team and spot, 10 for picking team and missing spot)
and "Record" (-1 for each difference between predicted and actual wins).
Name Picks Record Total
Dave Claus (inuxc!claus) 120 -35 85
Sports Illustrated 100 -23 77
(tekchips!stevev) 100 -29 71
Tom Short (seismo!short) 90 -21 69
Dave took the lead by correctly pegging 5 of the ten playoff spots (SF,
Miami and Pittsburgh to win, Dallas and the Raiders for wild cards) and
being the only person to pick the Cardinals for anything.
The low score, in case anybody's curious, was 50-30=20.
I will be off-net for the entire month of December, so you can expect the
final standings to be somewhat delayed, but I will send them out when
I return in January. I guess someone else will have to run the playoff poll.
Bill Laubenheimer
----------------------------------------UC-Berkeley Computer Science
...Killjoy went that-a-way---> ucbvax!wildbill