Measuring Super Wild Card weekend excitement and win probabilities
The Good, Bad, and the Ugly from the NFL's opening weekend of playoff football
Throughout the NFL playoffs I’m going to keep track of the play-by-play win probability and excitement of each game. I love looking at win probability graphs because they 1) look spectacular and 2) help tell the story visually of how a given game played out.
Let’s recap last weekend’s Super Wild Card games with these charts and give out awards for the Good, the Bad and the Ugly1.
Best Game of the Weekend Award
It’s tough to argue against Sunday’s Dolphins-Bills matchup in Orchard Park, New York being the best game. According to Game Excitement Index2, it was the most exciting game of the weekend with a GEI score of 5.25.
Buffalo raced out to an early lead before Miami roaring came back to take the lead in the third quarter. But the Bills avoided a major collapse as they held on for a 34-31 win.
Biggest Comeback
While comebacks are very exciting in this writer’s opinion, Chargers-Jaguars didn’t beat out the Bills and Dolphins for most exciting game of the weekend. Nevertheless, you’d be excused if you turned this one off at halftime because Trevor Lawrence and the Jaguars were atrocious in the first half. Lawrence threw four interceptions to hand the Chargers a 27-point lead at one point in the second quarter.
But the Jaguars were surgical in coming from behind in the second half, as Lawrence accounted for four TDs and engineered the game-winning drive to put his team in position for Riley Patterson's 36-yard field goal on the final play.
The comeback was the largest in franchise history and the third largest in playoff history. Just look at that near-zero win probability in the lates stages of the first half.
Worst Game of the Weekend
The worst game of the weekend belonged to Monday Night. Father time may finally be catching up to Tom Brady. His offense looked flat in the face of Dallas’ stellar defensive effort, and the Cowboys paired that with a fantastic game from Dak Prescott on offense to win 31-14.
Bang Bang Niner Gang Award
Ok I just made up this ridiculous award name because I didn’t know what else to call it and needed an excuse to talk about the Niners because I live in the Bay Area. Ugly if you’re Seattle, good if you’re San Francisco. Either way, fresh off a nine-game win streak to close out the regular season, the 49ers entered the game as 10-point favorites according to Vegas oddsmakers. San Francisco did not disappoint bettors as the 49ers routed the Seahawks 41-23.
Seattle scored nearly all its points in the second quarter which is the only point at which they saw their win probability get north of 50 percent, but the Niners stepped on the gas in the second half to pull away for an 18-point victory (the biggest on the weekend). That is becoming a familiar narrative for Niners opponents this season.
If you want more win probability graphs and GEI ranks on a game by game basis check out my NFL Win Probability app.
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.