Even in a sport where early retirements are all the rage in recent seasons, this one shocked the NFL world. On Saturday night, ESPN’s Adam Schefter reported that Indianapolis Colts quarterback Andrew Luck had informed the team he was retiring due to being “mentally worn down”: Filed to ESPN: Andrew Luck has informed the Colts […]
The NFL’s wild-card round may have been a brutal showcase of grind-it-out defense and uninspired offensive play-calling. But at least it threw another intriguing wrench into what was already shaping up to be a chaotic postseason. Three of the four favorites (according to FiveThirtyEight’s pregame Elo ratings) lost on opening weekend: the home Texans, Ravens […]
gfoster (Geoff Foster, sports editor): The wild-card weekend — the best weekend — is in the books, and it would be hard to argue that it wasn’t great. Three of four road teams won. With the exception of the Colts wiping out the Texans, every game was within a touchdown. Let’s start with the most […]
sara.ziegler (Sara Ziegler, assistant sports editor): The NFL’s 2018 regular season is finally in the books. Before the playoffs get rolling, let’s look back on an interesting Week 17 and preview next weekend’s wild-card round. We’ll end with giving our Super Bowl predictions again, just to keep us honest. Salfino (Michael Salfino, contributor): I will […]
It’s the last week of the NFL’s regular season, and that means it’s time to game out all of the fun playoff scenarios facing each team. Here at FiveThirtyEight, we like to measure the most important games of the week based on how much they swing every team’s odds of making the postseason (across every […]