Here's what the Super Wild Card win probabilities and Divisional Round odds look like
Charts and takeaways from the NFL's opening weekend of playoff football, and a look ahead to this weekend's games
After years of debate among owners the NFL moved to a 14-team playoff field in 2020, the result of which is now two more games being played on Wild Card weekend. In most years since the change the games have lived up to their Super moniker.
This year’s opening slate of the NFL playoffs that took place last weekend, however, gave us a mixed bag of excitement — it included a few breakout performances from young quarterbacks that resulted in upsets, some chalk outcomes we all saw coming and a resounding face-plant from the NFC East contingent.
Like I’ve written before I love looking at win probability graphs because they look spectacular, and help tell the story of how a given game played out. Now, I know you’re not here for the game recaps because those have already been told all over the internet this week, so let’s instead recap this weekend’s Super Wild Card games by focusing on how exciting each game was using a measure known as Game Excitement Index (GEI1).
Cleveland vs. Houston
Breakout QB CJ Stroud had one of the best rookie regular seasons ever by any measure. In his playoff debut he proved that performance wasn’t a fluke as he became the youngest quarterback to ever win a playoff game. Stroud threw for 274 yards and three touchdowns, while his defense returned two interceptions by Browns quarterback Joe Flacco for touchdowns in a 45-14 rout of the Cleveland Browns Saturday.
The game was such a blowout by the fourth quarter the Texans put backup QB Davis Mills in near the end of the game. Houston’s win probability was near 100 percent for the entire final frame, a big reason in why this game was well under the NFL season average of 3.75 GEI.
Miami vs. Kansas City
The main storyline coming into the Dolphins-Chiefs game at Arrowhead was the weather. Temperatures hovered well below 0 degrees Fahrenheit in what turned out to be one of the coldest games in NFL postseason history, but the Miami offense proved to be even colder than the thermometer.
Kansas City led from the get-go en route to a 26-7 victory, while the Dolphins didn’t score any points in three of the four quarters. When a game is that one-sided the excitement index doesn’t have much opportunity to jump off the page, so it’s no surprise this one ended with a GEI score of just 2.55.
Green Bay vs. Dallas
The worst game of the weekend was the best game of Jordan Love’s life. The Green Bay quarterback threw three touchdowns on 16 of 21 passing, while running back Aaron Jones added three more scores for a Packers shellacking of the Dallas Cowboys.
A game as high scoring as this 48-32 contest usually has a high GEI as well, but this one wasn’t anywhere as close as what the final score indicated.
“We came in here with a mindset of we’re going to dominate,” Love said after the game. “A lot of people were counting us out, and we didn’t care about that.”
Los Angeles vs. Detroit
In what turned out to be the best game of Wild Card weekend — both in the headlines and excitement on the field — Jared Goff and the Detroit Lions outlasted Matthew Stafford’s Los Angeles Rams 24-23 at raucous Ford Field.
The Lions ended a nine-game postseason losing streak dating back to 1992 for a franchise synonymous with ineptitude in the process.
The contest carried a weekend-high Game Excitement Index of 3.78 despite win probability favoring Detroit virtually the entire game. The Rams’ win probability blipped over 50 percent as they were driving midway through the fourth quarter down by a point, but a holding penalty pushed Los Angeles out of field goal range, and Stafford — the former Lion — then threw incomplete on fourth down. Detroit would not surrender any more points the rest of the way.
“That’s the best home atmosphere I’ve ever played in, and I expect next week will top that,” Goff said after the game.
Detroit, the NFC's No. 3 seed, will have a second home playoff games for the first time in franchise history, hosting Tampa Bay in the divisional round Sunday.
Pittsburgh vs. Buffalo
This game was moved from Sunday to Monday due to a winter storm that dumped snow on Orchard Park, NY throughout the weekend. But that’s where the excitement ended, at least for Steelers fans.
Pittsburgh showed signs of life on either side of the half but their win probability never exceeded 25 percent outside the first quarter. They wound up losing 31-17 to a surging Buffalo Bills team that is all of a sudden a trendy pick to win the Super Bowl.
Philadelphia vs. Tampa Bay
Man, what happened to the Eagles the last couple months of the season? The Monday Night showdown between them and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers encapsulated everything wrong with Philadelphia near the end of 2023. The Eagles lost six of their last seven games of the year, and did so in convincing fashion.
Baker Mayfield looked like a future hall of fame quarterback against a Philly D that hasn’t shown up since November. Mayfield threw for 337 yards and three touchdowns to lead the Buccaneers to a 32-9 rout of the Eagles.
Overall, only one game — Rams vs. Lions — exceeded the NFL average GEI for the season, while the rest turned out to be duds. But as the stakes get higher the deeper we go into the playoffs, the better the games should get.
At least that’s what I’m hoping for — the more a win probability chart looks like an EKG, the better.
It should be no surprise the 49ers and Ravens are heavy favorites to make the Super Bowl since they’re coming off first round byes from this past weekend. San Francisco is oddsmakers’ pick to win it all with a 35 percent implied probability of a Super Bowl title entering the Divisional round. The Niners are the only team more likely than not to at least reach Las Vegas this year, according to Pinnacle’s odds.
When comparing several publicly available odds2, including professional oddsmakers like Pinnacle, Neil Paine, PFF, as well as other analytics models, the 49ers are still favorites to win Super Bowl LVIII. On a composite basis prognosticators have them at a 31.7 percent chance to win, while Baltimore sits at 24.9 percent and the Bills at 15.3 percent. Houston is least likely to make it to Vegas, let alone win football’s ultimate prize in February at less than three percent odds.
If you’re a stathead like me and want more win probability graphs and game excitement rankings check out my NFL Win Probability app, as well as my NFL analytics website for a deeper dive into league, team and player trends from this season.
I compute Game Excitement Index (GEI) to measure how exciting an individual game is, as the name implies. I calculate it similar to what Luke Benz has done in college basketball. The approach is to sum the absolute value of the win probability change from each play and multiply by a normalized time parameter. This gives us an index by which we can rank each game’s excitement factor. The way to interpret, for example, a Game Excitement Index of 4.0 is that the win probability changed by a total of 400% over the course of that game. The higher the number, the more exciting the game.