NFL Notes
In honor of this week's marquee matchup, we present the years in which the 49ers and the Cardinals have both had winning records: 1998, 1984, 1983, 1976, 1970, 1968 and 1960. It is safe to say that they will not be adding another season to that total of seven in 54 years.
The real marquee matchup is the game between the NY Jets and the Pittsburgh Steelers. A simple way to rate the games is to multiply the number of wins the respective teams have. The Jets have won 9 games and the Steelers 11, so the game rates as a 99, easily the best of any contest today, with only the Patriots/Bengals rating within 50 points of that. The spreadsheet sees the Steelers winning by about 18-14, although of course it is unlikely to hit that score exactly, since very few teams actually score 18 points (only two teams have done so this season). The spreadsheet says the game fairly represents the expected matchup, with the assumed home field advantage for the Steelers at 3.0 points (the league average so far this season), although both the Steelers (4.6) and the Jets (3.9) have larger HFAs, which could indicate that Pittsburgh should be favored by a little more in my spreadsheet. The line looks to be just about on the money around 5, whice means I wouldn't touch this game.
I took a quick look at how many times X number of points had been scored this season.
0 2
1 0
2 0
3 10
4 0
5 0
6 10
7 11
8 1
9 5
10 26
11 0
12 5
13 20
14 19
15 4
16 13
17 39
18 2
19 8
20 21
21 17
22 6
23 11
24 22
25 3
26 5
27 23
28 15
29 2
30 7
31 19
32 2
33 1
34 17
35 5
36 0
37 2
38 5
39 1
40 2
41 5
42 3
43 2
44 0
45 3
46 0
47 1
48 2
49 3
56 1
58 1
Looks like I missed the score of one ballgame, as that adds up to 382, but there have been 384 team scores so far this season. As you can see, 17 is the most common score, with about 10% of all teams ending with that point total. Aside from that there are obvious clusters at 6 & 7 and then every 7 points above those--13 & 14, 20 & 21, 27 & 28. Using the scores shown above, we can estimate potential winning percentages for every score as follows:
0 0%
1 1%
2 1%
3 1%
4 3%
5 3%
6 3%
7 6%
8 9%
9 9%
10 10%
11 17%
12 17%
13 18%
14 24%
15 29%
16 30%
17 33%
18 43%
19 44%
20 46%
21 51%
22 56%
23 57%
24 60%
25 66%
26 67%
27 68%
28 74%
29 78%
30 79%
31 80%
32 85%
33 86%
34 86%
35 91%
36 92%
37 92%
38 92%
39 94%
40 94%
41 95%
42 96%
43 97%
44 97%
45 97%
46 98%
47 98%
48 98%
49 99%
50 99%
51 99%
52 99%
53 99%
54 99%
55 99%
56 99%
57 100%
58 100%
As you can see, the Cleveland Browns were unfortunate indeed to lose that game to Cincinnati 58-48. Or rather I should say, their offense was unfortunate, they had done enough to win 98% of all ballgames. Unfortunately their defense couldn't close the deal.
That gave me an idea for a quick rating system. Suppose we take the actual scores of a team's games and look at how the offense did as compared to the defense. Let's start with the Indianapolis Colts. In week one, they lost to the New England Patriots 24-27. Looking at the chart, we see that when scoring 24 points, teams should win about 60% of their games, and teams giving up 27 points should win about 32% of their games (to determine winning percentage for teams giving up X points, just take 100% minus the number shown for that score). Doing this for every game on the Colts schedule gives us an average winning percentage for the Colt's offense of 84%, as compared to their defense's winning percentage of 52%.
I'll take a longer look at this later.
