Super Bowl LVIII thriller ended up being best game of the 2023 playoffs
Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs defeated the 49ers in heartstopping fashion last Sunday to earn their third championship in five years.
It was always going to be Mahomes. The Kansas City quarterback is seemingly unstoppable on drives where his team needs to score, and this year’s Super Bowl was no exception.
On a crucial 4th-and-1 in overtime coach Andy Reid put the ball in Mahomes’s hands. The MVP QB rolled out to his right after the snap, found a crease and gained eight yards on the play with his legs to keep the drive alive. On third down a few plays later he did it again, scrambling for 19 yards to the San Francisco 13-yard line. A pass in the endzone to Mecole Hardman with seconds left in the overtime period then sealed the deal.
The Chiefs were champions for a second straight year, and for the third time in a five-year stretch.
Despite what 49ers fans might think, it turned out to be the best game of this year’s playoffs.
Using Game Excitement Index (GEI1) we can quantify how exciting the Big Game was in comparison to all 285 NFL contests this season. GEI takes into account the swings in play to play win probability to provide a proxy for excitement, and this one was back and forth until the end, especially in the OT period. It proved to be the ninth best game of the entire season.
Neither team had a more than 80 percent chance to win at any point in regulation, according to the nflfastR model. San Francisco’s odds spiked to 99 percent after Jake Moody’s 27-yard field goal on the 49ers’ opening possession of overtime. But once the Chiefs got their opportunity to possess the ball Mahomes led a 13-play, 75-yard drive where he went 8-for-8 for 42 yards passing and a TD. He also posted a crucial 27 yards on the ground during the drive en route to the Hardman knockout punch.
As Kevin Cole pointed out in his Unexpected Points newsletter, Mahomes had a decent night by EPA per play standards, but most of that came on the ground rather than through the air — more than 40 percent of Mahomes’ total EPA came on scrambles and designed runs, including that key fourth down conversion in overtime.
The eight-yard scramble on 4th-and-1 was the most impactful play of the game — and arguably the season — which resulted in a 24 percent swing in win probability in favor of the Chiefs. His 19-yard scamper on third down added 21 percent of win probability for Kansas City, which was bested only by the aforementioned fourth down run and a 49ers muffed punt that gave the Chiefs the ball back on San Francisco’s 16 yard line in the third quarter.
This year’s Super Bowl was the first NFL playoff game to go into overtime since the league changed the rules last season. The new format allowed for both teams to possess the ball at least once, meaning every play ran in the extra period had an outsized impact on each team’s chances of winning the Lombardi Trophy.
And it delivered by resulting in the best game of the playoffs.
GEI Ranks: 1/13 Playoff Games | 9/285 Full Season
I didn’t get a chance to review the conference championship games a few weeks ago, so let’s rectify that here:
Conference Championships
Kansas City vs. Baltimore
This was a story of two elite AFC quarterbacks — one who has been criticized for not being able to perform on the playoff stage, despite being the league MVP this year, and another who pundits talk about like the second coming of Brady, Manning or Marino.
The latter pulled it out, as starting quarterback Patrick Mahomes connected on key passes with Taylor Swift’s beau Travis Kelce, including a touchdown in the first quarter, and a defense that was at its best. Kansas City defeated the Ravens 17-10 to earn a sport in the Super Bowl in Sin City.
The Chiefs led 17-7 at halftime; Justin Tucker’s 43-yard field goal with 2:34 to play was the only scoring of the second half. As the minutes ticked away on Baltimore’s season with no points since a Lamar Jackson touchdown early in the game, so did its win probability. With goose eggs on the scoreboard for much of the second half the GEI of this game was a measly 3.7, 0.06 points below an average NFL contest this season.
GEI Ranks: 2/2 Conference Games | 144/285 Full Season
Detroit vs. San Francisco
What did the city of Detroit do to deserve a Conference Championship weekend like that? With what seemed like the entire country — Eminem included — rooting for one of the most downtrodden franchises in all of sports, the demons haunting the Detroit Lions reared their ugly heads again in the NFC Championship Game.
It was certainly the better game of conference championship weekend, just don’t tell that to the scores of Lions fans that made the trek across the country to see their team in its first NFC title game since 1991.
It was the 49ers who earned a berth in Super Bowl LVIII by winning a 34-31 thriller at Levi’s Stadium, which included 27 unanswered points by the 49ers in the second half.
I was at the game, and the feeling among 49ers fans in my section was palpably downbeat at halftime. Their team was down 24-7 headed into the locker room and had a seven percent win probability midway through the third quarter, according to nflfastR. In other words, the Lions had a 93 percent chance to advance to the Super Bowl at that point; then it all came unraveled.
Instead of attempting a 46-yard field goal up two touchdowns, Detroit went for it on 4th-and-3 and failed as Jared Goff’s pass out of shotgun fell incomplete. San Francisco then turned the 14-point deficit into a 10-point lead through its next four possessions, and held on to win the NFC title.
GEI Ranks: 1/2 Conference Games | 139/285 Full Season
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’ll be back with more for the 2024 NFL season as well.
*Header photo courtesy of Jessica Harrison.
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.