NFL playoff races and other musings

Check this blog for the most current playoff predictions and a weekly analysis column. I’ll normally try to get the new predictions up by Tuesday. The analysis column will appear later in the week. This week’s topic “A week one loss isn’t that bad, is it?”

Feel free to leave feedback, questions, or ideas for future columns. Or if you’d like to contribute a column about the playoff race for your favorite team, let me know. Finally, if you aren’t running the software yourself, doing some detailed analysis for your own team, your missing 80% of the fun.

For the next several weeks, the predictions will be based on the pre-season power ratings. Somewhere between week 4 and week 6 I’ll switch over to power ratings caluclated from the actual outcomes of games. 

Without further ado, this week’s predictions:

This article was origially posted on the main site on July 24. I’m going to keep an archive of all the predictions in this blog.

The preseason predictions are made exactly like the regular season predictions, except the power rating are calculated from published over/under betting lines for regular season wins, instead of the outcomes of actual games. I don’t consider these to be nearly as reliable as predictions made after week 6 of the NFL season, because frankly, no one knows how good the various teams will be until a few games have been played. With that said, here is how the various divisions break down:

Predicted 2006 Division Finishes

Predicted 2006 Playoff Seedings