Well, Denver sure got beat. As good as Denver’s defense is, they were dominated by Pittsburgh’s offense for a huge portion of the game, and I’m not really even sure how Denver needs to improve their defense to not let that happen again. Pittsburgh’s third down conversions just killed them. That said, how they reacted [...]

Denver just punted from their 1-yard-line in the third quarter. I’m thinking game over. I’m so depressed!

Here is the preview of the Conference Championship games. This is the beatpath graph of the game results as they actually happened. As you saw from the previous power rankings, the fluke games from the last couple of weeks of the regular season have mostly canceled themselves out – the rankings were pretty stable. And, [...]

Time for the post-divisional power rankings. The top rankings are very defined by beatpaths this week, and not as much by tiebreakers. We’ll again show the full power rankings this week, because as always, the beatpath graph is an ecology, and everything affects everything else. Here’s the current beatpath graph, with every game result taken [...]

This isn’t really beatpaths-related, but wow. Going through the various sports columns, I haven’t seen this level of rationalization about a team (New England) for a long time. They really were the media’s little darling, weren’t they? Terry Bradshaw said something like that if Denver and New England were to play ten times, New England [...]

Well, the beatpaths were 2-2 this week, successfully picking Denver over New England, and Carolina over Chicago. As I said, the WAS=>SEA pick was an extremely tight pick, but PIT=>IND was a plain old upset. And I missed the last five minutes! I hope the highlights on NFL Primetime are detailed enough – I went [...]

Here’s the preview of the Divisional games. This is again the beatpath graph that has all the results as they actually occurred in the closing weeks of the season, since teams should be playing with all-out effort this week and hopefully be working to cancel out any flukey results from earlier in the season. And, [...]

We’ll again have a full listing of power rankings this week. Even though a small number of teams played, the beatpath graph is an ecology, and everything affects everything else, so we’ll see some shuffling. You’ll see proof that sometimes the ordering of the rankings is determined by very tiny shifts in the data. Here’s [...]

Pittsburgh @ Cincinnati: The beatpaths were 3-1 this week, and that’s not including what we said about the NE/JAC game being so close that home-field-advantage might adjust the pick. That said, I was surprised at how dominant New England was over Jacksonville, and Carson Palmer’s injury was also a bit of an asterisk. While Palmer [...]