I like a good underdog pick and that's why I'm taking the Cowboys over the Vikings tonight -- here's why I think the favored Vikings will succumb to the Cowboys.


Although my Predict model has the Vikings winning 80% of the time I am going to venture to say that Dallas has a better than 20% of winning -- models are not meant to be full proof, and in fact, while my NFL model has a high accuracy of 68%, it still can be wrong 32% of the time. This is where Explore comes into play and the powerful charting and analytics tools that form a wholistic analysis of match-ups. I suggest to anyone using Predict to also validate your findings with Explore.

Now to the charts from Explore. Interestingly, I use 2nd and 4th quarter points scored in my Predict model. Using those two stats helped increase my model accuracy by almost 5%, which is huge. So it means there is good predictive value in using the 2nd and 4th quarter performance. Well, below is a quarter-by-quarter graph that shows how strong Dallas has been this season.



I also really like Dallas's passing yards this season, although they do give up more passing yards than the Vikings.


Finally, I really like Dallas's ability to get first downs and their third down's made edges just over the Vikings'. Should be an interesting game so let's see what happens.