Posts about NFL
Hello all,
After watching last night's game and seeing the Baltimore preseason streak end, It made my mind wonder if there was anything particularly good or bad about winning all of the preseason games. It also made me wonder if losing all of them led to any particular result. So, I decided to gather all of the historical records for preseason NFL seasons in the last decade+. Before I post the results, I will make note that the 2020 regular season record is not included in this data due to, well, the 2020 preseason being cancelled. This means I used the 2012-2019, then 2021-2022 preseason, regular seasons, and postseasons as data.
Results:
https://i.redd.it/2fj4ned8yqjb1.pngThere were 33 teams with a 1.000 and 33 teams with a .000 record during this time frame, with a remaining 254 having a record somewhere in the middle. The expected playoff% of each category was 38.75%. Regular preseason records had 38.19%, "perfect" preseason records had 36.36%, and "worst" preseason (no wins) teams had a 45.45% success rate of making the playoffs. The difference in the last category might seem significant at first, but in reality it means that 15 out of 33 bad preseason teams made the playoffs instead of 12-13 expected if preseason records are truly random.
Average regular season record tells a very similar story. Teams that won all preseason games went on to have an average record of .484. Teams that won no preseason games had an average record of .472. The remaining teams by default have an average .506 record, meaning the irregular preseason teams extra losses make up less than 1% of all NFL games in this time frame.
The "made superbowl" and "won superbowl" categories don't hold a significant amount of data (20 super bowl teams, 10 winners out of 320 total teams) to draw any conclusion, but I thought it would be neat to show the data anyways. Only one team with a perfect preseason made the Superbowl, the 2013 Seattle Seahawks, and they managed to win it. Teams without any preseason wins never made the Superbowl during this time frame (an expected 2 were supposed to make it, not significant). However, after digging through the rest of the data I could in the ESPN database for preseason games, no team with all losses in the preseason has made the Superbowl (since 2004, can't find older data). That makes a total of 50 teams not making the Superbowl in that group, with and expected value of 3.125 teams. Still not significant, but interesting.
Other neat facts: the highest deviation from preseason record to regular season record is the 2017 Cleveland Browns, who went from not knowing how to lose (preseason 1.000) to forgetting how to win entirely (0.000 regular season). The 2012 AFC East had the worst preseason of all time, going 1-15 as a division. The Baltimore Ravens (unsurprisingly) have the best average preseason record during this time, while the Atlanta Falcons have the worst. Birds of a feather did not flock together in this case.
Here are the average preseason records of all the data I collected:
TL;DR I wasted my time today, the preseason doesn't matter, but teams should try to win at least one preseason game to block bad juju.