Hello everyone! Very interesting week – last season this would have been seen as a lot of boring games, but I think we’re seeing some things shake out in terms of relative quality of teams, and there might be some surprises. The picks were 8-6 5-9 last week, which means there’s a fair amount of shaking out to do!
This week also has the first difference between the Standard graph and the Iterative graphs. We also have our first division with a perfect hierarchy, the AFC East. It makes sense given NYJ beat the rest of the division, BUF lost to them all, and NE beat MIA to resolve the middle.
Oddities:
3-1 Chicago and 3-1 Green Bay only have beatpaths to two teams.
2-2 Jacksonville has managed to loop away all four games.
Two four-team beatpaths, each leading into a five team beatpath, feels really high for this early in the season.
I don’t really think it’s that odd. It speaks more to the quality of their opponents than anything. HOU and BAL are also 3-1 with 2 links removed from loops, but they’re wins are over better opponents.
Long paths at this point in the season are pretty common. The split into two paths at the middle is also common. This is what I found for week 4 in recent history.
2009: 5 and 4-team paths leading into same 4-team path.
2008: 10-team path and 8-team path with a few crossovers.
2007: 5 and 4-team paths leading into same 5-team path.
2006: 10-team path, but no other long paths.
2005: 5 and 3-team paths leading into same 7-team path.
2004: 6 and 5-team paths leading into same 5-team path which has 3 different possible endings!
2003: Longest paths are only 7-teams long.
2002: 4-team path (with 2 different starts) leads into a 6 and 5-team path.
2001: Longest path is only 5-teams long!
Seems like it’s an artifact of the schedule. By this point in the season most teams have played at least 2 of their 6 in-division games (seems like there was a lot of games between division opponents this week). There haven’t been as many common opponent for teams in a given division to flatten out the graph or to make loops from.
The schedule does seem a bit weirder to me than normal, more division games bunched up in short periods of time for teams, more long road or home streaks too… weird, but it could totally be my imagination, I haven’t paid attention to every team in this regard, just some.
I went and checked, this year has the most loops for week 4 since the realignment in 2002. You have to go back to 1988 to find another year with 5 loops in week 4.
2010: 5 loops
2009: 0 loops!
2008: 3 loops
2007: 4 loops
2006: 3 loops
2005: 4 loops
2004: 1 loop
2003: 3 loops
2002: 3 loops
Also regarding long road/home streaks, I can’t speak for other teams, but NE has been home/away/home/away so far.