After a rather shocking or horrific season, depending on who you ask (we’re looking at you Cowboy fans), there’s only one more game to go before the close of the 2016-2017 NFL season. Superbowl LI (or 51 for those who don’t understand Roman numerals) will be played between the New England Patriots and the Atlanta Falcons tomorrow, February 5 2017, in Houston at the NRG Stadium. Everybody has their picks of who will win tomorrow’s big game, and Microsoft’s Bing is getting on on the action as well.
Bing Predicts is giving a slight edge to the New England Patriots, with a 52.3% chance of winning the game. Of all of the 266 NFL games played so far (regular season and the playoffs combined), Bing has correctly picked the winner of 169 of them. That’s a 63% success rate, more than both the folks at FiveThirtyEight and even with opening lines released in Las Vegas (according to Pro-Football-Reference).
Starting out the season, Bing didn’t do so well on its picks, correctly choosing only 51.9% of the games in the first seven weeks of the season. However this was greatly improved upon starting from week eight until today, with a 72.2% success rate. The second half numbers undoubtedly reflect Bing acquiring more knowledge on the teams that it misread at the start. But they also can be attributed to teams that proved the easiest to predict week-to-week.
The Patriots have easily had the better season, being one of the most dominant teams in the league since the Brady-Belichick era. Then again the Falcons are no slouch, and with only its second Superbowl appearance, the team is sure to not want to blow another chance at a ring.
