Football Bytes: The Must-Win Games for Faltering Playoff Hopefuls

Plus, a different way of looking at QB W-L records.

Welcome to Football Bytes — a new spin-off of my baseball column that I’m experimenting with, in which I point out several byte-sized pieces of information that jumped out to me from my various football spreadsheets. If you’ve noticed a Football Byte of your own, email me and I’ll feature it in a future column!

🏈 Winning Time

To borrow a phrase from Yogi Berra, it’s “getting late early” for several NFL teams.

The 0-3 Cincinnati Bengals, for instance, have seen their playoff odds go from over 50 percent to below 20 percent in the span of just three games. (Even by the standards of a team known for its slow starts, that’s a concerning trajectory.) And the Bengals aren’t alone. The Jaguars, 49ers, Cowboys, Titans and Dolphins have also seen their playoff probabilities drop by at least 15 percentage points in Weeks 1-3, even if none of those drops have been quite as steep as Cincy’s 34-point dip:

That means it’s time to start winning games, if some of these teams are going to climb out of the holes they’ve dug for themselves early in the season. And to see which contests are the most crucial to win, let’s peek under the hood of the simulation results from my Elo forecast — looking for the games that swing the playoff odds the most for teams currently under 50 percent to get in.

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😰 Cincinnati Bengals (0-3)

Current playoff odds: 18.7% (-33.9 from preseason)
Most important game in next 3 weeks: Week 5 vs. Baltimore
PO% with Win: 33.0% | PO% with Loss: 8.0%

Joe Burrow and the Bengals generally need to pull things together, to be clear — their odds of making the playoffs would fall further, to 11.1%, if they move to 0-4 by losing at Carolina to the suddenly resurgent Andy Dalton. But the Ravens game looms especially large because Baltimore is a team the Bengals will need to compete with not just in the division, but also the wild card, with the 3-0 Steelers somewhat surprisingly checking in as division favorites.

Most important game of season: Week 5 vs. Baltimore
Next-most important games: Week 11 at LAC; Week 10 at BAL; Week 18 at PIT

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😰 Jacksonville Jaguars (0-3)

Current playoff odds: 22.1% (-20.5 from preseason)
Most important game in next 3 weeks: Week 4 at Houston
PO% with Win: 37.9% | PO% with Loss: 12.3%

After a miserable 47-10 shellacking at the hands of the Bills on Monday Night, the Jags are 0-3 and searching for answers. The good news for Jacksonville? They can redeem themselves some right away with a win against the Texans next week — the most important game of the entire season for the Jaguars. After Sam Darnold had a 4-TD performance against Houston, maybe Trevor Lawrence can get back on track as well after a horrible start to the season.

Most important game of season: Week 4 at Houston
Next-most important games: Week 9 at PHI; Week 13 vs. HOU; Week 16 at LV

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😰 Dallas Cowboys (1-2)

Current playoff odds: 46.0% (-18.5 from preseason)
Most important game in next 3 weeks: Week 6 vs. Detroit
PO% with Win: 59.6% | PO% with Loss: 30.6%

Though the sky always seems to be falling in Jerry World when the Cowboys lose back-to-back games, they’re currently in better shape than the Bengals or Jags in terms of the playoff odds. Still, those odds will begin to look a lot less like a coin-flip if Dallas doesn’t beat Detroit — a team that also figures to be right in the NFC wild-card mix — in three weeks. And of course, the back end of the Cowboys’ schedule is filled with NFC East battles that will be varying degrees of must-win, as usual.

Most important game of season: Week 17 at Philadelphia
PO% with Win: 66.7% | PO% with Loss: 29.6%
Next-most important games: Week 10 vs. PHI; Week 18 vs. WAS; Week 12 at WAS

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😰 Tennessee Titans (0-3)

Current playoff odds: 10.9% (-18.4 from preseason)
Most important game in next 3 weeks: Week 4 at Miami
PO% with Win: 22.8% | PO% with Loss: 5.7%

Despite positioning themselves away from a full rebuild, things haven’t gone especially well in any area for the Titans in Brian Callahan’s first season as coach. The offense is scoring just 16 PPG with Will Levis struggling to more INTs than TDs, and the defense is allowing 26 PPG. If Tennessee is going to make anything of this year, they need to beat Miami next week — then use the bye week to gather themselves, before facing more crucial games against Indy and Buffalo right afterwards. The Titans’ entire season basically comes down to that stretch over the next month.

Most important game of season: Week 7 at Buffalo
PO% with Win: 27.9% | PO% with Loss: 7.8%
Next-most important games: Week 16 at IND; Week 12 at HOU; Week 4 at MIA

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😰 Miami Dolphins (1-2)

Current playoff odds: 38.1% (-15.0 from preseason)
Most important game in next 3 weeks: Week 5 at New England
PO% with Win: 49.0% | PO% with Loss: 26.5%

By contrast, the Dolphins’ most important games are not for a number of weeks. This might be viewed as a good thing, since Tua Tagovailoa isn’t eligible to return from injured reserve until after Week 7 at the earliest — meaning Miami may be able to limp along with some patchwork of QBs in the meantime. (Skylar Thompson was also injured last week and he may be due to be replaced anyway, given how poorly he’s played.) There’s no guarantee Tua will clear concussion protocols in time to make those important games, though, and they can’t let things slip too far away from them before then. In simulations where they lose at least one of the next two games (versus the Titans or Patriots), Miami makes the playoffs just 25 percent of the time.

Most important game of season: Week 18 at N.Y. Jets
PO% with Win: 56.0% | PO% with Loss: 24.6%
Next-most important games: Week 17 at CLE; Week 12 vs. NE; Week 11 vs. LV

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One other fun thing we can do with this data is to calculate the swings for both teams in each game, and find the most likely combined swing — weighted by the probability of either team winning. Here are the most important games of Week 4 by this measure:

Interestingly, the Bengals-Panthers matchup is the lowest-leverage game of the week, despite Cincinnati’s desperate need for wins, because the potential swings are ultimately low when both teams start out below 20 percent playoff odds. The most important game of the week, by contrast, is a Jets-Broncos game that would exert roughly a 30-point swing on either team’s playoff probabilities, depending on who wins.

🏈 QB Winz, Adjuzted

The idea of a win-loss record for quarterbacks is both intoxicating and repulsive, depending on how you view football (or sports at large). For some, the main job of the QB is to win ballgames — through whatever means necessary, particularly in the clutch — while others recognize that the QB is just one of many players on a team, and his ability to will a team to the W is inherently limited.

But one idea I’ve had is whether we can find a middle ground by looking at a “win” for a QB as whether or not he outplayed his counterpart on the other sideline.

So consider this an early experimentation in that thought process. To judge a “starting” QB’s success,¹ we’ll first measure their passing + rushing Expected Points Added (EPA), or an estimate from years before EPA existed, and we’ll adjust it for both the quality of the opposing defense — how much did they outperform the EPA the opponent usually allowed to starters in all other games? — and the location of the game.² Then we’ll compare these figures for both QBs in a game: If you had the better outing relative to the competition, that’s a Win.

This produces some fun results for 2024 thus far:

(As I think about it, perhaps there should be an additional adjustment for the strength of the opposing QBs a starter tended to face? Maybe something for next time around.)

Here were the leaders from 2023, including the playoffs:

It’s interesting that Lamar Jackson was not among the top handful in net wins despite winning MVP (and having a 14-4 record in real life). His “losses” were to C.J. Stroud, Joshua Dobbs, Deshaun Watson, Justin Herbert, Matthew Stafford, Trevor Lawrence and, in the playoffs, Patrick Mahomes. Make of that what you will.

Poor Bryce Young had by far the worst net wins in the league, getting outplayed by his counterpart 15 times in 16 games. That actually surpassed David Carr in 2002 (-12 net wins) as the worst W-L record in a season since 1970, according to this method.

At the other end of the spectrum, here are the best seasons since 1970 by net wins:

Mostly, this is a relatively unsurprising list, with the exception of maybe fewer Tom Brady seasons than we’d expect and some weird appearances by Dak Prescott and Vinny Testaverde. (Perhaps another argument to see what happens when we adjust the head-to-head for quality of opponents? Who knows.)

And finally, here are the career leaders in net wins according to this method:

This is all just fun to mess around with at the moment, but it is interesting to see which QBs tended to consistently outproduce the opponent over large samples like seasons and careers. Along those lines, here’s one last example for the road: Steve Young, Joe Montana and Patrick Mahomes each won almost exactly 76 percent of their head-to-head matchups, the best marks for any QBs with at least 100 “starts” since the 1970 merger.

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Filed under: NFL, Football Bytes

1. I put “starting” in scare quotes, because it’s actually looking at who the primary QB was for a team each game — based on who had the most rush-modified dropbacks. To me, that’s a better way of looking at starters anyway, since what we really want is to focus on who played the bulk of the game at QB for a team.

2. Home QBs tend to get a boost of about +0.24 EPA per game; road QBs lose 0.24 EPA/game.