This speed comes with some uncertainty. If there’s a penalty before the next snap or a coach challenges a spot, for example, the prediction won’t always be precisely correct. But so far we’ve been encouraged with the speed and accuracy of the live calls, which usually come ahead of the televised fourth-down snap, enabling you to be both smarter and more annoying wherever you watch your football.

A New Model

The original incarnation of the bot used a statistical model developed by Brian Burke, creator of Advanced Football Analytics. In the off-season, Mr. Burke and his model were picked up on the free-agency market by ESPN, so we created our own win-probability model to power the bot this year. (As sad as we were to lose Mr. Burke’s company and his model, we’re looking forward to seeing what he does at his new gig.)

Many things excite us about our new model. Our goal is to make the analytics available and accessible to everyday fans — not just to N.F.L. teams. Specifically, there are three significant improvements to the bot this year:

Better kicking estimates As Benjamin Morris at FiveThirtyEight wrote convincingly in January, N.F.L. kickers have become incredibly good. Many statistical models use two generic N.F.L. teams since 2001, but kickers have simply gotten much more accurate in recent years, and this year’s model is updated to reflect that.

Better yet, our kicking model also accounts for weather and who’s doing the kicking. Consider two hypothetical 50-yard field goals. If, in one instance, it’s being kicked indoors on turf by the Raiders’ Sebastian Janikowski, the bot will estimate a 79 percent chance of success.

On the other hand, if the 50-yarder is being taken by a less accurate kicker like Billy Cundiff — on a 15-degree night on the grass of Lambeau Field with 20-mile-per-hour winds — that estimate shrinks to 37 percent. These estimates have huge fourth-down implications. (The bot doesn’t account for wind direction, but if it’s windy, the data shows that it’s harder to kick field goals over all. A separate post detailing the effects of kickers and weather is coming soon.)