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- Elo and Cortana have made their picks for the Super Bowl.
- Cortana correctly picked 65% of the games this season and Elo was not far behind at 62%.
- The computers are backing the New England Patriots ... barely.
- Check out all of our coverage of Super Bowl LIII here.
The NFL's conference championship games are here, and Cortana is back to make picks in a head-to-head showdown with Elo.
We looked at two popular systems used to pick NFL games: Cortana, Microsoft's digital assistant, and Elo, the modeling system used by Nate Silver's data-journalism site, FiveThirtyEight.
In both cases, the computers are picking outright winners and not against the spread. Each gives a likelihood that a team will win, which in theory could help measure the strength of certain lines.
Cortana had another strong season, correctly picking 65% of the games, while Elo nailed 62% overall. Both models struggled in the Wild Card round, went 4-0 in the divisional round, but missed on both conference championship games.
Here are their picks for the Super Bowl, with the percent chance of winning in parentheses. Point spreads are for reference, via Vegas Insider as of Friday morning.