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About

This repository contains a python cli application for predicting nfl spreads. The app trains a model from the latest available data and predicts upcoming matchups. In addition to running locally, a github action uses the cli app to train the model and publish the predictions for upcoming games to this release.

Visit the docs for the model and training data for more details on each.

This project exists for a few reasons:

  • I wanted to see how well a simplistic model would do at predicting the spread. I suspected this is a situation where something like 20% of the work could get you 80% of the results (known as the Pareto Principle), with "results" being Vegas-like spread prediction accuracy. I think this ended up being the case. See the model doc for more details.
  • I wanted to build an end-to-end training and prediction pipeline in github actions.
  • I wanted to compile an insightful dataset from atomic NFL play-by-play data. See the training data doc for more details on this.

Using

Pre-requisites

  • Python 3 (developed on 3.12)
  • Poetry (developed on 1.7.1)

Project Setup

Clone this repository to your local machine:

git clone https://github.com/BlairCurrey/nfl-analytics.git

Navigate to the repository:

cd nfl-analytics

Install dependencies with Poetry:

poetry install

At this point you should be able to run the cli app:

poetry run python nfl_analytics/main.py --help

Model Setup

On initial setup, you will need to download all the data for training the model:

poetry run python nfl_analytics/main.py --download

This downloads all the raw data required to train the model to ./nfl_analytics/data.

Then you can train the model:

poetry run python nfl_analytics/main.py --train

This builds and saves the training dataset and then trains the model. The model and scaler used in training and the training dataset are saved to ./nfl_analytics/assets.

Now you can use the model to predict games.

Predicting Games

Provide the home and away team (in that order) to --predict to predict a specific upcoming game:

poetry run python nfl_analytics/main.py --predict kc sf

An exact list list of team abbreviations can be found in ./nfl_analytics/config.py.

Alternatively, you can predict all upcoming games, which fetches upcoming matchups from an external api and saves the predictions to ./nfl_analytics/assets:

poetry run python nfl_analytics/main.py --predict-all

The prediction returns a float for the matchup relative to the home team. For example, if the kc sf prediction returns 1.3, that means it favors kc (the home team) by 1.4 points.

Updating the Model

To update the model, you can re-download the latest year and re-train the model:

poetry run python nfl_analytics/main.py --download 2024 --train