"Game of the Week"

I can already hear the incredulous outcry, "Denver vs. New England not the Game of the Week? ARE YOU NUTS?!", so I feel the need to pre-emptively clarify.

Game of the Week is obviously fairly subjective. For most of us, it's whichever game our team is playing, followed, probably, by the game that affects its playoff hopes most. Even setting aside personal affiliations, there are still several criteria you might use for deciding what the best game of the week is: you might want to see the highest level of play, or the most competitive game, or the game that means the most to the teams playing it, or the game that has the biggest impact on the league overall.

For purposes of this ranking, the Game of the Week is the game that meets the last of these criteria; specifically, the game that tells us the most about which NFL teams will likely play in the post-season. After all, at the end of the day, determining that is the purpose of the regular season, isn't it? These games also tend to be pretty competitive games between pretty good teams, by the nature of it—if they weren't, they wouldn't matter as much.

Still not convinced? Fine. Here's what to watch this week, depending on what you want to see.

Fortunately, the game time scheduling is actually pretty good this week, so you can watch a fair number of these games if you so desire.

All right, back to our scheduled programming.

Source

Mike Beuoy at fivethirtyeight.com. The ranking that his simulation is based on, along with the current projected probabilities of the season's result for each team can be found here. The betting lines in the table below, which were also used to compute the expected impact of each game, come from vegasinsider.com. updated as of Friday morning

All Games of Week 9, ranked by influence on playoff picture

^{1. The sum of the expected value of how much every team's odds of making the playoff will change after the game is played. See "Points of Interpretation."}

^{2. Boldfaced for the highest-impact game of each time slot.}

Points of Interpretation

^{• For purposes of this table, a team's goal is considered to be making the playoffs, full stop. Playoff seeding is NOT taken into account. Bottom line: If the table doesn't tell you to root against a team, you know that its victory won't significantly jeopardize your team's playoff chances..}

^{• The table reflects results that were statistically significant in the context of a simulation repeated 10,000 times. Practically speaking, this means that if a game's outcome influences a team's chances of making the playoffs by less than ~.1%, it will not be reflected in the table.}

^{• "Expected Impact" [as opposed to "Swing", the number given by the OP,] is a measure of how much we expect a game to tell us about the playoff picture, on average. The closer a game's odds are to even, ceteris paribus, the higher this number will be. You can look at that as reflecting the fact that when the odds are 50-50, our uncertainty about the game is greatest; and thus the information we expect to glean from the result is highest.}

^{• The percentage given for "Expected Impact" corresponds to the chance of a single team's making the playoffs. For example, suppose that team A and team B are playing a game that decides which of them makes the playoffs—winner is in, loser is out—and suppose that the odds on this game are even. The expected impact of this game, for these two teams, will be 100%: each team had a 50% chance of making the playoffs before the game; after it, one team's chance drops to 0% while the other's rises to 100%.}

Points of Interest

GAMES

• MOST IMPORTANT: The most important game of week 9 is Philadelphia (5‑2) vs. Houston (4‑4), an interconference game between two teams that are very much in contention, both for their divisions and for the wild card. This game basically pits conference against conference, with half the AFC wanting the NFC team to win and most of the NFC wanting the AFC team to win.

• LEAST IMPORTANT: Minnesota (3‑5) and Washington (3‑5) were in the last two "Irrelevant Games of the Week", and each won its game. Pumped from its irrelevant victory, Washington followed its win up by beating the mighty Dallas Cowboys with its third-string quarterback, which was NOT supposed to happen. If these two teams keep winning games, one of these weeks they're going to disqualify themselves from playing in irrelevant games altogether. But this is not that week.

• MOST CRITICAL: After a dismal start to the season, New Orleans (3‑4) is finally poised to take its division, as everyone expects it to—but first they have to show that they can win a game on the road. Can the Saints come marching into the division lead? Not if Carolina has anything to say about it...

  The Carolina Panthers won their first game to take the division lead, won a second just for kicks, and then decided to show the world that you really don't need wins to be the NFC South Champion. They proceeded to win only one out of their next six games, while, remarkably, never giving up the division lead or even sharing it. It looks like it's finally time for them to win another game if they want to keep the lead for another week—but who knows? Maybe the Panthers can pull off another tie to preserve the NFC South status quo. I, for one, will be rooting for them to do just that.

  (It's worth noting that Baltimore vs. Pittsburgh is also a critical game for both teams, but not quite as critical, as those two teams are in the wild card race, whereas in the NFC South it's division or bust.) edit: When a new simulation was run after the Thursday-night game, taking into account the latest betting lines, this had changed: by those numbers, the Steelers needed to beat Baltimore this week even more than New Orleans needed to beat Carolina.

TEAMS

• POPULAR: Counting this as "# teams rooting for/# teams rooting against", the most popular team of the week is the New York Jets! Everybody loves the Jets, at least when they're playing the formidable Kansas City. (Don't listen to fans of the other AFC East teams who tell you that they always root against the Jets; they're pulling for them too, this week—or they would if they were wise.)

• DETERMINED: As noted above, all 4 teams in the two intradivisional matchups this week really want to win their games, but New Orleans wants it the most.

• COULDN'T CARE LESS: Tennessee (2‑6) (which has a bye) joins Oakland (0‑7) and Jacksonville (1‑7) in not caring about any of this week's games.

Previous Posts

Week 8
Week 7.5
Week 7