Editors Note: Be sure to enter your picks in the Stampede Blue Prediction Contest. Get in early so you have a chance to be the best predictor on the site!

These predictor posts kind of fell off last season, and I don't want that to happen again this year. I've made a couple improvements to the predictor, and the previous results jumped up over 5% against the spread over the past 5 years, which I was thrilled with, and I still have quite a few ideas to make it even better.

Each week I'll let you know what the predictor says for each game of the NFL season, and I'd really like to see if it can beat everyone against the spread. That's your challenge. Can you do it?

Here's the picks for Week 1:

Over the course of a season, teams have their share of good luck, and bad luck, and most of the time the two don't line up exactly the same, meaning some teams face more bad luck than others.  Sometimes it's pretty obvious which teams experience very good luck (like the Browns from last year), and others it's tough to put an actual value to it.  But that doesn't mean we can't do it.

A very common way to estimate Winning Percentage in football is to use the Pythagorean Expectation formula:

This was originally invented by Bill James for Baseball, but has been modified by several other sports, including football, to the exponents shown above.  By doing this, you have an estimated Winning Percentage that you can compare against the actual Winning Percentage, and the difference becomes our "Luck" value.  It tells us a little more about the teams season, showing how many wins the should have had, based on Points Scored/Allowed.

While this is a good method, I think we can do better.  If you remember correctly, our Winning Stats has both an Offensive and Defensive "Score", so why not use them, as they take into account way more than just Points. Also, I found another method that spits out a Winning Percentage that takes into account the consistency of the team as well.  It's called the Correlated Gaussian Method (CGM), and I got the idea from Ken Pomeroy, who runs the awesome stats site for College Basketball. I'm not going to explain the method here, but if you have questions, feel free to shoot me an email, and I'll explain what I did.

OK, enough set-up.  Which team was the luckiest in 2009?  And what team had the worst luck?  Let's find out...

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Earlier this week we took a look at how NFL Offenses did in various situations on Third Down, and we found that the Colts were pretty dominant in 2009 (in other news, water is wet).  But as we all know, there are two sides to every football team, so let's look at the defense, and see how underwhelming the Colts were in 2009.

As a refresher, here are the NFL Averages for 2009:

Now, would you believe me if I told you that the Colts did lead the league in one aspect of Third Down Defense?  If you really think about it, it should not surprise you what that is.  Follow me after the jump to find out the answer, and see how the Colts Defense stacked up against others in 2009...

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Previously we've taken a look at how the Colts did on both Offense and Defense on 3rd Downs in 2009, but just how well do they stack up against the rest of the league.  Today, we'll look at the offensive side of the ball.

Overall, the League Averages look like this:

A couple things jumped out at me:

• No anomalies at all:  Short Yardage numbers are better than Medium Yardage, and Medium Yardage numbers are better than Long Yardage.
• Running the ball had a better conversion percentage than Passing, but that makes some sense.  Roughly 64% of all runs on 3rd down were 3 yards or less.  How many passes were from 3 yards or less?  18%.  You have now all passed Some Stats Can be Misleading 101.
• Overall, 39.0% of 3rd Downs were converted in the NFL in 2009.  We'll look later at how that compares to other seasons between '01 and '08.

After the jump I'll give a Team by Team breakdown of all 3rd Down stats, and show you how awesome the Colts are at converting 3rd downs...

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Sunday, we looked at the Colts 2009 Offense on 3rd Down plays, breaking them down by distance and Run vs. Pass, and the Colts were just fantastic. leading the league in all the passing categories, and overall.  I think we all knew this would be the case.

However, there are 2 sides to a football team, so let's take a look at the Colts 2009 Defense.  Overall, the Colts defense was 104/231, or 45.0%, which was not very good at all.  The eye test would agree with these numbers, as it sure looked like the Colts struggled mightily at times.  Let's again take a game-by-game look at the defense, and see where exactly the struggles came from...

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One of the things I'm looking at this summer to improve the Winning Stats is further breaking down 3rd Down Conversion Percentage into Rushing and Passing.  We've learned that Passing and Rushing are significantly different, in terms of winning games, so it only makes sense that the splitting 3rd Down Conversion Pct. into those two categories may give us a better measurement for winning games.

Our first step in looking into this is to look at the 2009 Colts Offense.  Overall, the Colts were 95/193, or 49.2%, best in the NFL.  None of you should be surprised by this.  But how well did the Colts do when you break it down by category?  Follow me after the jump to find out...

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During the offseason last year, we looked at an array of stats reaching across all aspects of the game.  We found out which stats lead to the most wins (Drive Success Rate and Adjusted Net Passing Yards / Attempt), and which ones lead to the least wins (Yards / Carry and Net Punting Average), based on statistics from 2001 - 2008.  We had lots of time to figure out which stats we wanted to look at, but I jumped into the analysis articles without a full explanation of my methodology.

Then when I finished those around August, I had a whirlwind month where I basically had to put this stuff to the side until kickoff of Week 1, so I rushed into the season without a way of predicting games, which is ultimately my end game by doing all this.  I played around a little bit, settled on a pretty good method, and ran with it, and gave a short explanation on what I was doing.  I did the same thing with Adjusting for Opponents as well, but I don't think I really did a good job fully explaining.

After the jump I'll fully explain everything I did, complete with pictures and examples, so that you can all become experts on this stuff, and share the knowledge with the ill-informed.

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Throughout the season, we've been looking at the Winning Stats, and how they've played out in each Colts game.  We also looked at the running Season Total, and saw just how well the Offense and Defense were playing.  I hope it gave you some insight into what makes a winning NFL football team, at least statistically.

What I thought I'd do is show you the final numbers from the season, the final Power Rankings and Strength of Schedule, Game by Game rankings for the Colts, and some of the best games by any team in 2009.  One note as well:  These stats include Curtis Painter time, as the Colts weren't the only team to rest starters, so instead of adjusting a whole bunch of games, I just put the actual stats in there.

Let's get to it, as there are quite a few tables after the jump:

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