Quick Hits: Lions-Packers play thrilling Thursday Night Football game
TNF doesn't always get the best games, but this Thursday's NFC North clash delivered
The matchup between the NFC North’s top two teams did not disappoint. Both teams were likely to make the playoffs before the game even kicked off, but they played like a postseason berth was on the line Thursday night.
After head coach Dan Campbell made a gutsy — and aggressive fourth down call, even by analytics standards — Lions kicker Jake Bates hit the game-winning field goal as time expired to beat rival Green Bay 34-31 at Ford Field.
With their 11th win in a row the Lions clinched a spot in the NFC playoffs, and will now take aim at the NFC’s all-important No. 1 seed — they have the Bills, Bears, 49ers and Vikings left on the schedule. Detroit has a 1.5-game lead over the Philadelphia Eagles for the No. 1 seed, while the Packers fell to just one-game ahead of the Washington Commanders in the wild-card race.
Not only were the stakes high, but the game itself lived up to the hype. It was the 57th most exciting game (out of 196 so far) of the 2024 NFL season, according to Between the Pipes’ favorite metric Game Excitement Index (GEI)1.
While it wasn’t one of the top most exciting games this year it was about 1.0 better on the GEI scale than a typical game (4.82 vs. 3.82 average), and made all that more exciting knowing we could be seeing these two teams meet again in the playoffs.
I was inspired to look at this game’s thrill ranking after reading Owen Phillip’s similar analysis for NBA Cup games at The F5 earlier in the week. I like how he described quantifying excitement as how far the win probability “travels” over the course of a game.
“A game in which both teams appeared to have the upper hand at multiple points would be very exciting. Whereas a game that was over in the first quarter would be very unexciting. To put it simply, the more zig zags a win probability graph has, the more exciting the game was.”
Let’s look at the top five most exciting NFL games of the year through this win probability lens:
1. Week 9: LA Rams at Seattle Seahawks
GEI Rank: 1st out of 196 games
This season’s most exciting game, according to GEI, was the Week 9 NFC West matchup between the Rams and Seahawks. Seattle won 26-20 in overtime at Lumen Field after Demarcus Robinson made a one-handed, 39-yard touchdown catch to end the game.
2. Week 5: Tampa Bay Buccaneers at Atlanta Falcons
GEI Rank: 2nd out of 196 games
Baker Mayfield’s Bucs show up three times in the top 5 of this list. I don’t know what that says about him or Tampa Bay, but I know it means you should tune into Buccaneers games if they’re on TV in your region. In this game though it was the other quarterback, Kirk Cousins, who got the last laugh. Cousins threw for a career-high 509 yards and four touchdowns, the last of which was a 45-yard scoring pass to KhaDarel Hodge in overtime that gave Atlanta a 36-30 victory at home.
3. Week 13: Tampa Bay Buccaneers at Carolina Panthers
GEI Rank: 3rd out of 196 games
Just last week Mayfield led a comeback against Bryce Young and the Panthers. Down a field goal after Carolina took the lead with 2:35 to go in the fourth quarter, Tampa Bay came back to tie it and eventually won 26-23 in overtime.
4. Week 2: Tampa Bay Buccaneers at Detroit Lions
GEI Rank: 4th out of 196 games
I told you Mayfield has a knack for playing these thrilling games. This particular contest has the honor of being this season’s most exciting game that hasn’t gone to overtime. Naturally OT games are going to provide wild swings in win probability given the extra time they have to accumulate win probability and the EKG-esque nature of those swings as each score has a dramatic effect on a team’s chances of winning the game.
It’s also the only game Detroit has lost this season.
5. Week 12: Tennessee Titans at Houston Texans
GEI Rank: 5th out of 196 games
Titans quarterback Will Levis threw for 278 yards in this game capped by a 70-yard touchdown pass to Chig Okonkwo that gave Tennessee a lead it would never relinquish. The Titans held on for a 32-27 victory, a rare bright spot in an otherwise dismal season for Tennessee.
To check out the win probability graphs and game excitement rankings for every game this season see 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) 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.