Crude NFL Ratings, 2011

The NFL is a distant third on my list of pro sports interests (baseball is #1, of course, and horse racing ranks #2), but I’m interested enough to run the teams through my crude rating system (see explanation here) and figure I might post the ratings here. They are based on points/points allowed, adjusted for strength of schedule. 100 represents a win/loss ratio of 1, and so the resulting ratings are adjusted win ratios and can very easily be used to estimate the probability of a team winning a particular game. A team with a rating of 100 should beat a team with a rating of 50 2/3 of the time (100/(100 + 50)).

Actually, let me first run a list based on actual wins and losses. I’ve actually calculated W/L ratio as (W + .5)/(L + .5) here just to avoid the (real in the NFL) possibility of a 16-0 team crashing the system:



In the chart, aW% is an adjusted W%; it averages to .500 for the NFL and will produce the same list in rank order as the CTR; I prefer the latter because of its Log5 readiness, but aW% is a more meaningful unit. SOS is the weighted average of opponent’s strength of schedule. “rk” is the team’s rank in CTR, while “s rk” is the team’s rank in the SOS estimate.

I really do not care for the actual W% presentation for the NFL due to the short season magnifying differences in the teams. The Packers tower over the league here, which is appropriate given a 15-1 record against a decent schedule, but it doesn’t have any predictive value. You will notice in the table above that the NFC does quite well, which will be carry through to the points-based ratings:



Green Bay does not even rank #1 in the league; both New Orleans and San Francisco rank ahead of them. The top nine and eleven of the top fourteen teams made the playoffs, which is pretty good I think.

The aggregate ratings for the divisions (simply the average rating of the four teams) illustrates the superiority of the NFC and why I don’t care for micro-divisions:



Last year, the NFC West in turned in a ghastly 29 rating. Led by San Francisco, they were from the worst in the league, a distinction that went to their AFC brethren.

This whole exercise would be devoid of a great deal of entertainment value if I did not use the results to estimate Super Bowl probabilities. The disclaimer list here is lengthy enough that I will skip it less I leave anything out. A credibility adjustment would be pretty simple to implement (adding 12 games of a 100 rating would do the trick), but this is just NFL stats, not something important. The playoff odds do consider home field advantage; the home team’s rating is multiplied by 57/43 to reflect a fairly average NFL home field advantage. I feel bad about listing the probabilities to the thousandth place, but there are so many possible combinations for the championship games and Super Bowl that those tables would look silly without it:



Two road favorites on the first weekend is probably pretty typical given the quality of teams that often win micro-divisions (particularly those like the AFC West). The Denver Broncos simply aren’t a very good football team (it is tough for me to leave it at that, but piling on more snark re: you-know-who is beyond excessive at this point).



I like reseeding in theory, but when your initial seeding insists that Denver ranks #4 in the AFC because they are the sharpest scissors in the kindergarten classroom, it loses some of its luster.



Life is tough enough as a Browns fan without having to worry about horrors like a Denver/Cincinnati AFC title game, but thankfully there’s a 99.8% chance that will not come to pass. Pittsburgh/Baltimore, on the other hand, is the most likely championship game scenario that doesn’t involve either conference’s #1 seed.



Combining all of these, here are the playoff probabilities for each team:



The system still considers Green Bay the Super Bowl favorites even though they rank below New Orleans and San Francisco, thanks to favorable second round matchups and home field advantage, which is much more significant in the NFL playoffs than in MLB. Ratings and home field aside, if the NFC title game turns out to be Packers/Saints, I’m picking the latter to win it all. These probabilities add up to a 57% chance of the NFC representative winning the Super Bowl.