Beatpaths

St. Louis at Dallas: No real change to the graph or rankings after Dallas loses to St. Louis.
Afternoon Games: I’m not sure whether Minnesota’s victory should just be counted as an asterisk or if it is actually somewhat valid – seemed pretty lopsided early on for Chicago just phoning it in. But with the [...]

Time for the preview of this week’s upcoming games. This is the final week of the season, and it’s guaranteed now that the top twelve teams in the rankings will not match the NFL playoff teams. The question is, how extreme will the difference be? It turns that for every combination of [...]

Our current tiebreaking algorithm (strength of direct beatwins) gave us a record of 9-7 this week; 152-88 for the season. The beatflukes variant was also 9-7; 155-85 for the season. Again this week, there were some obvious home field advantage games that might have led to a better record with some human input. [...]

Monday Night: No change to the graph or rankings after New England defeats the Jets. Last week’s power rankings were 10-6 this week.
Sunday Games: Chicago wins, Minnesota loses, Minnesota is three games back of Chicago, and the beatpaths have Minnesota ranked ahead of Chicago.
The reason is because Buffalo’s win caused Chicago to lose their [...]

Time for the preview of this week’s upcoming games. This week will be about the NFC East – there’s a weird dynamic developing where the beatpaths system thinks that the NFC East is very different than they look in the standings. Some of it is supported by the fact that Washington has such [...]

We have a guest column up over at Two Minute Warning, where we introduce the beatpaths concept and discuss some of the upcoming week’s key games.

Our current tiebreaking algorithm (strength of direct beatwins) gave us a record of 9-7 this week; 143-81 for the season. The beatfluke variant was 10-6 after correctly picking WAS=>DAL; 146-78 for the season. This was one of those weeks where the record probably could have been improved significantly by paying attention to home-field-advantage. [...]

Time for the rest of the games. Click here to see how the Saturday results affected things.
Evening: Chicago stomps Atlanta and probably makes their team better than it was all season. They get a beatpath to Atlanta. According to the rankings as they exist right now, Chicago is the highest-ranking team in [...]

DEN@BUF: No change after Denver defeats Buffalo.
KC@NYG: The Giants’ victory finally helps them climb a few spots in the rankings after being mired in the middle for a while. Interestingly, Minnesota reclaims its ranking just ahead of Chicago, due to their beatwin over the Giants looking more impressive. This victory should change the [...]

Time for the preview of this week’s upcoming games. The season projection still shows Washington overtaking the other two NFC East teams, even though they’re two games out of first place right now. I’m not sure how the actual playoff tiebreaker works for the NFC East, but if things shake out as they’re [...]