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 victory, the Giants remain behind Minnesota and fall behind Atlanta as well. The graph still includes Miami’s victory over New England.
Big Movers:
Up: KC, MIA, BAL, TEN, NYJ
Down: NE, NYG, SD, CLE, PHI, OAK
(However, it’s pretty clear that Miami knew they had all they could handle with their starters playing against NE’s second and third team. If you flip it so that New England won, the only big movers left are the Jets up and the Eagles and Raiders down. The relative playoff rankings would be about the same, with Dallas ranked in the top six, and the Giants still behind Atlanta.)
Early Games: The GB=>SEA upset is considered largely irrelevant by the beatpath graph, but the MIA=>NE actually shuffles things around a bit by ranking Miami just ahead New England. If there were a way to give Miami credit for the win without penalizing New England, you’d see Miami retain the beatwin over San Diego, but New England will still have the beatwin over Tampa Bay. If you remove the MIA/NE game entirely, the rankings are a bit more sane (although the Giants still wouldn’t be in the top six of the NFC).
Big Movers:
Up: KC, MIA, TEN, NYJ
Down: NE, NYG, SD, DET, PHI
Saturday Games: No unexpected results yet. No changes in the rankings yet, either. Here’s the graph as it looks after the two Saturday games, with the Broncos and Giants victorious:
And here is to my Giants beating Carolina this coming week!
Although, I think that if they do beat Carolina, it won’t impact their beatpaths (thanks to the Minnesota game).
One of the challenges of having a ranking system based on only wins and losses is that when can’t really start putting in asterisks for situations like the Minnesota/Chicago game, as that adds a subjective element to it, which is exactly what you were trying to avoid. It’d be best to let the results stand.
Yeah, in that sense they’ll remain as-is. What’s funny is that before this week, most variants had Minnesota ranked ahead of Chicago. But now, even with Minnesota beating Chicago, Chicago is ranked ahead, and it’s because of all the other game outcomes. I think that’s what I like about this system the best – every team depends on every other team in an ecological sense. Even with the loss, Chicago’s ecology changed enough that they’re considered slightly better than Minnesota now.