It’s a cliche: Every game counts in a league that plays just 16 of them. But Benjamin Morris’s findings in his debut Skeptical Football column were nevertheless striking: A Week 1 or Week 2 game can affect an NFL team’s chances of making the playoffs by as much as 20 or 30 percent. We also […]
It’s a cliche: Every game counts in a league that plays just 16 of them. But Benjamin Morris’s findings in his debut Skeptical Football column were nevertheless striking: A Week 1 or Week 2 game can affect an NFL team’s chances of making the playoffs by as much as 20 or 30 percent. We also […]
We rolled out our NFL Elo ratings last week, giving us a set of computer power ratings for each team, each week, going back to the 1970 AFL-NFL merger. There are a lot of cool things we can do with these numbers; for example, I used them Monday to quantify how upset-heavy Week 1 of […]
We rolled out our NFL Elo ratings last week, giving us a set of computer power ratings for each team, each week, going back to the 1970 AFL-NFL merger. There are a lot of cool things we can do with these numbers; for example, I used them Monday to quantify how upset-heavy Week 1 of […]
If you followed FiveThirtyEight’s coverage during the World Cup, you know that we’re big fans of the World Football Elo Ratings. They’re based on a relatively simple system developed by the physicist Arpad Elo to rate chess players. But they can be adapted fairly easily for other head-to-head competitions from baseball to backgammon. We thought […]
