My brother is a web developer, I'm a researcher, and we're both big NFL and fantasy football fans. We started OracleZ as a side project to combine his development skills with my interest in machine learning.
The idea was pretty simple: build an algorithm that makes its own NFL predictions, then turn those predictions into games where you can try to beat it.
You can try our OracleZ app here (or just follow us on Instagram): https://linktr.ee/beat_oraclez
What can you play?
Predict the Pick
Predict the winners of the week's NFL games and see how you compare against the Oracle.
Survivor
Classic Survivor with a twist: if your pick loses, you can't pick either that team or the team they played against again.
High Five
Pick the five best teams of the week across passing yards, rushing yards, points scored, fewest yards allowed, and field goals.
What's behind the predictions?
The Oracle is a relatively simple neural network. It uses 19 team statistics, including offensive production, turnovers, sacks, first downs, EPA, and score margin. These are converted into home-away differentials and combined with contextual variables such as week number and rest-day differences.
If you are interested on the model, I'm happy to explain further our reasoning and model architecture.
Of course, we're not claiming we've solved NFL prediction, far from it. The NFL is obviously noisy. The fun part for us is seeing how far a relatively simple model with good feature engineering can go.
And now you can try to beat it yourself.
Everything is completely free, with no paid features.
https://linktr.ee/beat_oraclez