And with one week, many teams fall out of playoff contention… The Detroit Lions (9-6) are unable to stamp a Wild Card berth against the Dallas Cowboys (13-2) and find themselves with a real possibility of losing out to the Green Bay Packers (9-6), the Washington Redskins (8-6-1), and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (8-7). The…
In our previous post, we identified the probabilities that each team had of winning their respective divisions. In this post, we saw how muddled a couple divisions were (NFC North and AFC South in particular). However, these divisions have nothing on the Wild Card races. In this second part, we race the Giants-Eagles game to…
After an incredible shake-up in the Week 15 standings, and a monumental collapse of BOTH my fantasy football teams, we find the landscape of the NFL playoffs ever so tightening heading into Week 16. For instance… Chiefs Take First from Raiders, Drop First to TITANS… A week after grabbing first place of the AFC West…
A couple years ago, an article by Bill James on ‘How Safe a College Basketball Lead’ is given a point differential between two NCAA basketball teams was published. This article identified a method for estimating the number of seconds a lead is safe. The algorithm is given as follows: Take the differential and subtract three points. If…
With week 14 of the NFL kicking off on Thursday with a tight Kansas City Chiefs 21-13 victory over the Oakland Raiders, the playoff landscape immediately changed with Oakland falling out of the West Division lead into the top wild card spot. Before the Sunday games, the current NFL standings are: We then perform the…
Squared Statistics: Understanding Basketball Analytics 