What a first week it was. With or without anything on Antonio Brown, there's still too much from this week to cover without going into great detail, and most of it it outside the scope of an analytics-focused blog. Let's dive into the ratings a bit!
First up, the standings table. If you also read my entries on the CFL, you'll notice much of the same stuff from those standings shown here. The image is a little bit bigger, the text much smaller, but much of the same material. In detail, here's what you see, going from left to right:
- Right after the team names are their rankings in my Sagarin-style ratings. Teams in the top 10 are highlighted. Because some teams play stronger schedules than others, the relationship between a high rating and a good record is not 100% correlated, although there still is a strong relationship.
- Current records following one week of games.
- Projected final records, fleshed out by those Sagarin-style ratings.
- Projected final conference and division records. Useful in breaking ties.
- Conference and division, number of games remaining on the teams' schedules, number of games played, total number of games in the year. Because this table will eventually include postseason games, some teams will have up to 19 or 20 games by the end of the season.
- "Should be" records reflect how a team would do if the ratings were always right. By the end of the season, the higher-rated team in a number of games will end up having lost. This doesn't actually have any bearing on anything, but I find it interesting nonetheless.
- The ceilings and floors are the best and worst records a team can reasonably expect to finish with, if their current ratings are maintained. These will change throughout the season, and quite a few from this week's post could turn out to be completely off.
- The median records, which are the midpoints between ceilings and floors.
- The final column shows the numbers of tossups for each team. This reflects the number of games a team has left, which are expected to be decided within a certain margin of points. This week, that margin is 2.56, which is the current home-field advantage given by Jeff Sagarin.
Other than how bad the Miami Dolphins currently are, there are a few more things to take away from these images.
You might have noticed that teams who won are generally rated higher than those who lost. The highest loser is the Houston Texans, who lost in the last minute to a very highly rated New Orleans Saints team, at 12th, while the Oakland Raiders, who were very low to begin with, come in at 21st as the lowest week 1 winner. This is no coincidence, as current win percentage is one of the 17 factors that go into FredRank. With only one week in the books so far, getting a 1 in any factor is a big difference from getting a 0.
I should note that the Dolphins are about as low as a team can get; it would be virtually impossible for any team to score an imperfect 0 overall. Will they actually go 0-16 on the season? It's unlikely, even given how bad they are, but it's a better bet than years past.
I said I'd include either a chart or a table to track how teams move throughout the year; I went with a table. With a chart, you'd be able to tell that the top 5 are very high, that the Dolphins are very low, and that there are 26 teams in the middle.
If I end up getting questions on these, I know I'll hear about the Seattle Seahawks unless I address it here. How in the world can a projected 4-12 team be so high? 13th in FredRank, higher than two projected wild card teams and four 10-game-winners?
Put simply, it's because many of the ratings that go into FredRank are high on the Seahawks, but crucially, my Sagarin-style ratings are not. Fantasy point projections put them at 6-10, if I recall correctly, and a one-point win against the Cincinnati Bengals didn't do much to change that.
Eventually things should converge one way or another; it's unlikely that a team would be so unlucky to be so good and win only 4 games. Either they'll win more games than that, or the other ratings will catch on and they'll start moving down overall.
Be sure to leave any thoughts in the comments here, and don't forget to subscribe if you think you'll enjoy keeping track of the NFL and other leagues this year with me.
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