sporcle blog

Another year has passed, and at the beginning of each year, those of us who are football fans know that one of the more entertaining times of the NFL season is upon us. The playoffs. Some of the best games happen at this time of year, and the first week of the playoffs is one of the best sports weekends on TV, up there with the first week of March Madness.

Perhaps this year’s winner is a forgone conclusion, or perhaps a complete afterthought will make it to the ‘Big Game’. As they like to say in the marketing spiel…any given Sunday (or Saturday as the case may be). Don’t delay. You’ve got until this Saturday to put your stake in the sand.

Make your 2007-2008 NFL playoff picks.

And also, to see who’s picking what, check out the constantly updating NFL playoff pool statistics.

With the NFL season fast approaching, all the experts are getting their predictions in before thursday’s Indy/Saints game. Since you still have another day to make or change your picks, here’s a roundup of some of the predictions we could find around the web. We’ll combine these and put them into a pundit group over on sporcle.

Salon: King Kaufman’s AFC preview, shockingly not picking the Dolphins to win anything.

ESPN: Experts roundup.
ESPN Page 2: Greg Easterbrook picks the division winners, and comes up with some seriously whacked expected w/l records.

CBS Sportsline: Going through each division, one day at a time:
AFC East, AFC North, AFC South, AFC West(TBD)
NFC East, NFC North, NFC South, NFC West(TBD)

Sports Illustrated: Who needs online content? Apparently you should be buying the magazine if you want their NFL preview information.

And remember, make your own predictions here, the only place that puts the power of predicting into the hands of the common man or woman.

The NFL season is only a few days away (thursday night starting game? really? football is for sundays. done.), and here’s a little update on what people are predicting.

Sporcle user’s NFL 2007 Predictions

Four teams currently don’t have anyone picking them to win their division. These perennial winners are Buffalo, Cleveland, Washington and Atlanta. I’ll admit, I didn’t pick Atlanta either, but I think Joey Harrington is underrated. I think he’s got a good chance for a rebound year. All those years in Detroit, he was blessed with well…nothing. Pretty much everything around him was awful, from the other players all the way to the owner. I’ll be rooting for him to do well this year, though it’s possible that the curse of being a Lions QB will never rub off.

Looking over the division winners, almost every division has a run away team: (over 60% of users picking them to win)
AFC: New England, Indianapolis, San Diego
NFC: Philadelphia, Chicago, New Orleans, Seattle

Only the AFC North is fairly evenly split amongst Baltimore and Cincinnati. It will be interesting to see if these predicted teams hold up through the season. Another interesting observation, besides the current division leaders having won their division last year, the order of the teams in each division from top to bottom almost exactly mimic the 2006 final standings. Apparently the majority of people don’t believe the notion of parity in the NFL.

New England is currently picked to win the Super Bowl by almost 1 in 4 predictors. They certainly have a great coach, QB and what looks like a good supporting cast. As is usual with all predictions in the NFL though, it really comes down to injuries. If a team can stay healthy and keep most of their starting players through the year, they have a really good chance to win it all.

The statistics will continue to update between now and thursday’s starting game.

In honor of the 2007 NFL season which starts in a couple weeks, I thought I’d throw together a quiz to see how many of the Super Bowl winners of the past 41 years I could remember. In doing so, I came across some interesting statistics, that somewhat flies if the face of the parity argument that is thrown around by NFL commentators and chatterers.

Out of 41 years, the Super Bowl has only been won by 17 different teams. That’s just barely half of the teams in the NFL who have won in 4 decades.

To compare the other 3 major US sports during that time (% teams winning championship from 1967-present)
NFL: 17 of 32 (53%)
MLB: 19 of 30 (63%)
NBA: 14 of 31 (45%)
NHL: 16 of 30 (53%)

Obviously, these are not scientific numbers, because each league has expanded since 1967, and they had different #’s of teams during those 40 years. However, you’ll notice they are all fairly only slightly above or below 50% in ‘Championship Parity’. Why is this? Does it have to do with poor owners who don’t know how to build a team that can win, or the fact that star players tend to propel certain teams to championships in multiple years? I’m curious your thoughts.

Take the Super Bowl quiz yourself:
http://www.sporcle.com/games/superbowls.php