Hello gals and gents. Any readers from the regular season still out there? Are we still getting people finding PJD by searching for “Penis in vagina”? … well, we are now, unfortunately. Regardless, today we are taking one more look back at the 2009 Minnesota Vikings season to recap how successful PJD was in the game day predictions we made. Why would we do this? Well, for accountability reasons mostly, which major media people (and Shawn Zobel) don’t seem to be familiar with. Also, it teaches us, and our readers, a very valuable lesson. What is that lesson you, ask? Read on and we’ll tell you, although a hint would be that we’ve learned we’re just ass big of an asshole as anyone else out there when it comes to football prognostications. But you already knew that.
History: For those of you who are new around here (and I highly doubt anyone of you are just catching on to this site NOW), before every game last season PJD would provide a game day preview on Fridays. It was mostly filled with bullshit analysis that may or may not have had anything to do with the actual upcoming game. These included things like matchups that we don’t know shit about, who’s injured or possible gay, who has the hottest cheerleaders, or why we particularly hate a given city. You get the idea. At the end of this enticing “preview” we would offer our game prediction, not only who would win but also what the potential score would be. We would follow this up the next Monday with our game review, but rarely made note of the previous postings prediction. So that’s what we’re doing now. Wow. That was a boring fucking read.
Methodology: Once again I attacked this task with the utmost scientific care. I went back through every preview blog post we had in 2009 to check the predictions. I’m not going to post links to all the previews here – I’m lazy, the day is getting long, and drinking needs to soon commence – but if you were to go to the search bar on the right side there and type in something like “Masturbatory preview”, the majority of the results you’d get would be our preview posts from last year. Note; if you type in “fuck” you’ll probably get every single post we made. Neat. Anyway, we compiled a preeeeettty impressive Xcel spreadsheet that posts side by side the predictions of whether the Vikings would win or lose, as well as what we thought the final score would be, and the actual game outcome and true final score. Next to that, we posted what we have defined as the point differential. In doing so, we took the predicted margin of victory (let’s say 10 points) and subtracted that from the actual margin of victory (let’s say 7 points) to find that PJD was only 3 points off in our prediction. Obviously, we’re no gamblers, otherwise this would make a lot more sense, so if any of you are, and if any of you find fuck ups in my math here especially around the games we predicted the Vikings would win when they actually loss, tear us a new poop hole in the comments. When it’s all said and done though, this gives us an idea of how close or totally far off we were in our predictions
Results: As you can see, a Vikings blog that writes about Vikings was found to not pick against the Vikings, especially late in the season when the team had been looking like a lock for the Super Bowl before they came all over their face. It is kind of interesting that the predictions were closer in the beginning of the year. Our guess is that a lot of that had to do with lowered expectations for the team, and understanding that Childress was still a stupid gas bag when it came to coaching, but somewhere around the Seahawks and Bears game we seemed to get a little bit ahead of ourselves. While we were predicting high scoring affairs for the offense on a regular basis starting then, we also apparently weren’t giving the defense much credit. Looking back, it’s hilarious to think that the defense would have given up 23 points to the Seahags … although also thinking about that game, without a couple of key turnovers they may have. We also forgot how we had predicted the Vikings to lose both of the Packers games. Truly, we were anticipating a Favre heartbreak in the regular season then. But we should have trusted ourselves when we stated in the preseason that the costly interception would only come at the most inopportune time. Some thought it was during the Steelers game, we was a loss we predicted correctly, but boy were we wrong. REAL wrong. In a way that we’re still super fucking upset about, LAND BARON. On the positive side, we TOTALLY FUCKING NAILED the Rams game, victory and points combined. WE ARE AWESOME!! Even though that’s the only highlight of these predictions, it still makes me want to dance like this:
What really grabs us is how much we were sucked in to the Vikings season this year. We totally drank the Kool Aid and we totally shouldn’t have, because we knew they’d fuck it all up anyway. You can tell by the point predictions as well as if you were to read the previews as well. Early in the season we kept waiting for the let down (Packers, Steelers game) and tried to have reasonable, conservative point predictions. But by seasons end? That bullshit was out the window as we jumped on the bandwagon and looked like gaybos wrestling over a Lavender magazine. It’s worse when you read the rationality, too, a lot of “Well, this team couldn’t possibly lose to the Bears and Panthers back to back, could they??!” well, yeah, they did, and then went out and slaughtered the Giants too, after we decided we were pissed at them.
Conclusion: If anything we’ve learned that we don’t know shit. You can’t make up that Panthers loss last season (Matt fucking Moore??) and sweeping the Packers seems like a long shot again, if we’re being honest. Also? Never take our lines to Vegas. The fact that in the second half of the season we were off once by 32 points is embarrassing and ridiculous and kind of impressive all at the same time. Regardless, that’s kind of the whole point of following and writing about your favorite football team, in that you can debate stupid shit until your wife divorces you, all to see it blow up in your face like a semen filled balloon at a swingers party. So why do it? Because it sure as hell beats writing about politics or the stock market. BOOOORRRRINNNGGG!!
Anyway, we take full responsibility for being so stupid in our predictions and promise to do better next season. Of course, it shouldn’t be too hard to improve when you were this terrible to begin with. What are your thoughts on the predictions? Could you have done any better? NOT FUCKING LIKELY. But leave your comments regardless.
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