Last year I waited until after week 4 to start talking about the NFL playoff picture and possiblities. This year I'm starting earlier (quite arguably too early, but the same potentially could have been said about starting after week 4). Granted, a full playoff picture cannot be created from one game using my method (any unplayed game within the season is scored as a 0-0 tie), but I can use the Broncos victory over the Ravens to see how that affects the teams playoff possiblity percentage (to calculate this, I do a series of runs where unplayed games are randomly decided although for each run one team is selected to go undefeated for the rest of the year and another team is chosen to lose the rest of their games - that data is used to determine when a team is eliminated from contention or when a team has locked up a playoff spot).
Before the season starts, every team has a 25% chance of winning their division and a 37.5% chance of making the playoffs based on random outcomes of the games breaking down to a 6.25% chance at being each of the playoff seeds 1 - 6. The result of last night's game affected those percentages for all of the teams in the AFC North and AFC West.
By winning the opening game of the season, the Broncos have increased their likelyhood of winning the West by 4.3% to 29.3%. As a result, each of the other teams in the West saw their likelyhood go down by 1.4% (to 23.6%). Denver also saw their likelyhood of making the playoffs increase 8.2% to 45.7%. Most of that increase came at the expense of the Ravens, but the other teams in the West had their overall percentage drop 0.4% to 37.1%.
The affect on the teams in the North was the opposite of those in the West (not surprising). The Ravens, by losing, now win the division 20.7% of the time (down 4.3%) and make the playoffs 29.3% (down 8.2%). The other teams in the North benefit by winning the division an extra 1.4% of the time each (26.4%) and making the playoffs an extra 0.4% (37.9%).
There are affects on seeding percentages as well:
| #1 | #2 | #3 | #4 | #5 | #6 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Baltimore | 4.7% | 4.1% | 5.1% | 6.8% | 3.9% | 4.8% |
| Rest of the AFC North | 6.2% | 6.4% | 6.6% | 7.2% | 5.7% | 5.8% |
| Denver | 7.7% | 8.5% | 7.4% | 5.7% | 8.7% | 7.7% |
| Rest of the AFC West | 6.3% | 6.1% | 5.9% | 5.2% | 6.8% | 6.7% |
These numbers are skewed by the "win-out" condition I add to my program (since in half the runs, an AFC team goes 16-0, and Denver only accounts for 1/16 of those). I imagine without that, the Broncos would end up the #1 more often than the #2 right now.
These numbers will obviously change greatly after the first week. And I am aware that most games are not a 50/50 proposition, but I don't have a better way to model the games than that, and I think it allows us to see a truer picture since you never know when a team will get hot or cold in the NFL. With the season so short (compared to the other major sports), anything can really happen.
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