Premier League Projections, Week 9

We had some movement in the Premier League this weekend. Tottenham Hotspur took a bad tumble being outplayed at home by Newcastile, dropping down into the Everton zone of "hey maybe it isn't our year," West Ham United continued their improbable journey with a convincing victory over Manchester City. Right now I have the gap between Spurs, Everton and the Hammers as basically rounding error. One of them might make a run, but odds are good it won't be more than one of them.

The big match of the weekend was Chelsea's away draw against Manchester United. While a single point at home is not a particularly inspiring result, the Red Devils had by a good margin the better of the chances on the night. Chelsea has been a distinctly less impressive team since Diego Costa went down to injury. They scraped by Crystal Palace and snuck a point off United. Chelsea are still your title favorites by a good margin, but if they want to fully run away with it, they'll need to start dominating the shot chart again.

The big upset was Liverpool's inability to score at home against Hull City. Hull just parked a bus and denied Liverpool chances. This never worked last year, but here Liverpool had the vast majority of possession and could not even create enough chances to add up to a single expected goal.

They peppered shots in from distance and played a lot of crosses into whatever heads might be near the goal, but nothing came close to being a clear-cut scoring opportunity. Dropping points ugly, at home, against the club with the worst expected goals ratio in the Premier League? That'll hurt.

Let's go to the numbers.

Premier League Projections

• Full metholodogy, don't forget to click on "Methodology" for lots of math.
• EPL Advanced Statistics page, with many of the component stats for these projections.
• Because of rounding, the numbers may not all add up quite right.

• Gotta run.