Just following up on a comment I made earlier. Some on this board like McClain and some don't but one thing is for sure, his prowess at picking winners in NFL games against the spread is so bad it's embarrassing. McClain has his weekly football picks in the Chronicle all season. They were in the paper either Friday or Thursday (I think Friday). To this point in the season, he is 116 wins and 144 losses against the spread. That gives him a winning percentage of 44.6%. Let me give you an idea how poor that is. We do this exact same thing in our office each year and have done so for the last 5 years or so. This year we have 15 people who are participating. The person in first place has a winning percentage of 59.4% (not me unfortunately). The person in last place has a winning percentage of 46.5% (again not me, thank goodness). The woman in last place doesn't even follow the NFL but just participates for the fun of it. So our last place participant is almost 2 full percentage points ahead of McClain. Randomly flipping a coin for every game should, in the long run, give you very close to 50%. In fact, each year we do flip a coin every week to track our results vs. the "Coin Flip". This year "Coin Flip" is having a bad year. It is only coming in at 48.8% (more than 4 percentage points ahead of McClain). For laughs, yesterday we decided that starting this week we would add McClain to our listing of people along with "Coin Flip". It will kind of help those not doing so well to not feel so bad. Since no matter how bad they do, at least they are doing better than McClain.
One could argue that picking winners against the spread has little in common with his thoughts and opinions in the Chronicle. But you would think someone who tries to pass himself off as knowledgeable about the NFL ought to be able to use some of that knowledge to do a better job at picking games against the spread. Poor John. It will be interesting to see if he keeps it up and puts his results in the paper next year for all to see (and laugh at) or if the Chronicle will decide that the weekly "McClain's Picks" article has run it's course and is ready for retirement.
One could argue that picking winners against the spread has little in common with his thoughts and opinions in the Chronicle. But you would think someone who tries to pass himself off as knowledgeable about the NFL ought to be able to use some of that knowledge to do a better job at picking games against the spread. Poor John. It will be interesting to see if he keeps it up and puts his results in the paper next year for all to see (and laugh at) or if the Chronicle will decide that the weekly "McClain's Picks" article has run it's course and is ready for retirement.
