Here's info on our ladder predictions, the average of all our predictions for each team (but excluding the robot): Courage: 1.27 Reign: 3.18 Red Stars: 3.36 Pride: 3.55 Thorns: 4.27 Royals: 6.45 Spirit: 6.73 Sky Blue: 7.18 Dash: 9.00 Just to be sure I haven't missed something, here are entry gaps I have as of now. I know some of you may not be intending to do some of these, but let me know if I've missed something you've posted: I don't see any game result predictions for liesse00; and I don't see game result predictions for SiberianThunderT for the March 24-25 games. I don't see ladder predictions for SiberianThunderT or stubifier. I don't see playoff predictions from Blaze20, FawcettFan14, SiberianThunderT, Smallchief, or stubifier. I have playoff predictions from liesse00, but not whether the games were decided in regulation time (R), overtime (O), or by PKs (PK or KFTM). There's a 1 point bonus for each game for which you get the right decision scenario.
I'm not gonna be playing super-seriously, I won't be predicting every week, so don't worry about the "gaps" for me!
Next Four Games - April 14 and 15 [home team first] UTAH 1 vs. CHI 0 WAS 1 vs. NC 1 SKY 1 vs. SEA 1 POR 2 vs. ORL 0
Week 3 predictions (April 14-15) Utah 2, Chicago 0: Red Stars are depleted; Utah's offense has been anemic so far also, but they showed signs of life when Labonta and Tymrak came on last time. And I want them to win their home opener. Washington 2, North Carolina 2: Spirit's youthful talent is starting to gel, and Pugh is in great form. Can the Courage start putting shots on target? Sky Blue 1, Seattle 3: Reign are the most injury-free team right now. Meanwhile, a revamped Sky Blue side are still working out the kinks. Orlando 2, Portland 1: neither team is at full strength, but the Pride should have Morgan back. I predict she scores in front of a raucous Providence Park and her old fans.
For the games from Apr. 14 through the 18th: Utah - Chi, 0-0 DC-NC, 1-3 Sky Blue-Sea, 0-2 Por-Orl, 0-2 NC-Sea, 2-1 Chi-Hou, 0-0
Also, I guess the big number of supporter expected for this opener could actually be a factor. The roar of an home crowd can help: I predicted an Utah win too. I keep advising to put the home-team first, in predictions, or @cpthomas could be misled in the moment he has to insert data in the program that calculates weekly scores.
I did correctly capture FawcettFan14's score, but thanks for the reminder, as I might not always catch reversed team orders. As you've noted on another thread, there appears to be a question whether the Courage will be required to forfeit their game against Sky Blue. The issue has to do with whether Debinha, under FIFA "required release" rules, was eligible to play in that game. By my reading of the FIFA rules, she wasn't. As you noted somewhere, all the other teams had released their Brazilian players. Apparently, this was based on the rules, so the Courage effectively had the benefit of an uneven playing field. It appears that FIFA itself can require that the game be treated as a forfeit. I assume (but don't know) that the NWSL itself also can declare the game a forfeit. I think that's what the NWSL should do. You also raised the question (on another thread) about how, if a forfeit is declared, we should treat that on this predictions competition thread. My opinion is, if a forfeit is declared, we should treat it as a forfeit, with whatever score the NWSL assigns it. That will be the official result, and doing that will reward those of us (of which there were none) who figured out that the Courage would break the eligibility rules and get caught and punished (if that, indeed, is what happens). And, more practically, if the game is declared a forfeit, it could affect the final ladder and I don't think we want this thread's "official" final ladder to be different than the NWSL's actual final ladder. I guess we can wait to see what happens before we have to make a decision on our competition. On one more issue, raised by the question about whether the upcoming mid-week games are this week's games or next week's (which has only to do with the 1 point a week penalty for delayed posting of final ladder predictions), at this point I'm treating the competition weeks as Monday through Sunday, which would treat those games as next week's games. I can do it either way, so if anyone objects, please weigh in.
I totally agree with everything you said: it seems to me the best way to tackle the points that were mentioned in a consistent way. We always had good score-keepers on this kind of threads, but I have to be pleased that one more time, this year also, the guy who keeps the score has a so logical and clear way of thinking. Edit: Apparently I had done that on this very thread!
I've been feeling bad for the robot, what with international player absences and injuries. But then I realized that absences and injuries already are built into the data base the robot uses (last year's results gradually replaced by this year's results on a rolling basis), so there's nothing to feel bad about. An obvious, but nevertheless interesting, realization.
I know I totally forgot about making a prediction. We finally got some good weather where I lived and I became preoccupied with being outside. I did catch the first 60 minutes of the Utah/Chicago game tho.
Jodie Taylor denied me a perfect score in this prediction by flubbing a PK for Seattle at 85'. @cpthomas, you can blabber all the time about the theory that signing a player that was going to miss a PK was somehow built in Seattle Reign's history and ambience included in the data-base from previous years, or that having a GK that's more likely to guess the correct side for diving is built in Sky-Blue's data instead, but you won't persuade me. I put it all on Taylor: she does her duty and scores and I am one point ahead, she misses and I miss that single point too. It's as simple as that: nothing written in her destiny by events from years ago, just a woman, a ball and a goal on a rainy afternoon of April 2018. And no particular influence from the past on the chance that she puts that ball in or not!
The robot missed that one, too. Taylor puts it in and the robot would have gotten 1 point from that game rather than 0 (predicted 2-2 score).
Here's the week 3 report (let me know if there are any viewing problems): I'll do two week 4 reports, one after the mid-week games and the other next Monday.
I see you now have our names in alphabetical order. Probably easier for you, but I have to admit that I was finding the "score to date" order easier to read. I had already predicted the mid-week games, and at the moment I leave them as they are, although I could decide to change them later, should Rapinoe end on the injury list for that game or should the snow in Chicago last for long.