UPDATE: For the "Game of the Moment" see here. [Table is currently updated as of the 1st half's end for all relevant games: CLE-BAL currently Game of the Moment]

Special Regular Season Wrap-up Edition: Week 17

When I posted the Week 16 version of this last Sunday, a couple of people asked if I could post another edition before the earlier games. Ordinarily, this can be difficult, mainly because these posts draw their data from the results of Mike Beuoy's weekly simulations posted at fivethirtyeight.com, so I can't start working on them until he posts them.

This week is different, though, because it's the last week of the regular season! For one thing, that means it's the last week of the year I'll be posting these, so I wanted to give you a little extra. For another, it means I don't need to rely on Mike's Monte Carlo simulations this week. Since the remaining combinations of results and outcomes are relatively small*, I can calculate these numbers directly, and since they only involve one week, I can extrapolate the betting market's predictions directly from the lines for today's games. Doing it this way a) is slightly more reliable, since it eliminates the inevitable noise of a Monte Carlo simulation (i.e. coincidental correlations), and b) more up-to-date, since I can easily fix the numbers to reflect the latest lines—and c) by the same token, I can easily post an updated version before each game (as the results of any one important game affects the importance of others).

So one of the things I mean to do this week is give you updated versions of how important each game is at the time they're actually played, taking earlier results into account. I've even thought about doing Game of the Moment updates as the games are being played, using the In-Game Win Probability feature at advancednflstats.com. Imagine a channel that showed you the most important game going on at any given time; if one team started running away with the game, or the relative importance changed for any other reason, it would switch to the new most important game of the moment. If I posted these updates, you could emulate that yourself by switching channel surfing. I think the idea's kinda cool, but I don't know if anyone actually wants something like that, so if you want it, let me know by posting in the thread, please. edit: see here

^{*I'd like to thank /u/Big_Daddy_Diarrhea for his pair of posts detailing these combinations in easy-to-read tables, which I relied upon in preparing this post.}

What These Numbers Mean

The other thing I'd like to do this week is give a clearer explanation of whence these rankings and numbers are derived and what they actually mean. The full write-up will be posted at onlinesportsbetting.com later today (I'll add a link when that post is up), but here are a few key points for understanding the tables below:

• Except where a tie is the only thing that will help a team, ties are neglected in these tables. The reason for that is that, on the one hand, they would have made the tables much harder to prepare, and, on the other, due to their extreme unlikelihood, they are unlikely to significantly affect either a game itself, or what you might be rooting for as you watch it (though in the final possessions of a game, they could conceivably take on more importance).

• The metric of each game's importance has been rescaled from previous posts in this series. Specifically, it's been divided by two, so if you want to compare the importance of this week's games to the importance of previous weeks' games, be sure to account for that.

  The reason for the change, in a nutshell, is to make these numbers follow a logical scale, with a 100% representing the theoretical maximum importance a game can have (for details, again, see the write-up at [onlinesportsbetting.com]()).

• The metrics behind the headings of the "Notable Games This Week" table are now explained in footnotes to those headings.

Irrelevant Games of the Week

With most teams in the NFL eliminated from the playoffs by now, quite a number of games this week are irrelevant. I chose to highlight Bills-Patriots because I found it mildly amusing that the "highest-level" game of the week (by the metric I'm using to define that; again, see the footnote to the below table) is also entirely irrelevant.

Eagles-Giants gets an honorable mention, because this marks the fifth straight game that the Giants will play without affecting anybody's postseason at all and that streak deserves to be recognized. (It wasn't a foregone conclusion. If the Eagles had managed to win even one of their previous three games, this game would have been rather important.)

Notable Games This Week:

^{1. Being played for the unofficial [but non-arbitrary!] title of} NFL Champion^.

^{2. Both teams are in the top half of the NFL, by} Mike Beouy's ranking, ^{which, in turn, is extrapolated from the weekly betting lines for each game. "#1" means that this game features the highest minimum ranking of both teams playing [i.e. the ranking of the lower-ranked team].}

^{3. The point spread on this game is 1.5 or lower, which translates into winning odds of about 55% or under for the favored team. Spreads this low are fairly uncommon. For comparison, homefield advantage is generally worth about 2.5-3 points.}

^{4. Has the largest effect on any one team's playoff chances, by the same calculation used to determine games' overall importance—with one difference: while this calculation is generally based on the Vegas odds for each game, from the POV of a team that's actually involved in the game, its odds are considered 50-50 no matter what, since this game's results are "in its control".}

^{5. Has the highest minimum effect on the chances of either team involved. As in the previous case, for this purpose, each team's odds of winning its own game are considered 50-50 from its POV.}

^{6. Has an impact [in case the rankings are derived from a Monte Carlo simulation: a statistically significant impact] on the highest number of teams in the NFL.}

^{7. Highest impact on which teams make the playoffs at all, without taking seeding into account.}

^{8. Highest impact on the postseason with seeding taken into account, giving each seed a weight proportionate to its} theoretical correlation with Super Bowl victory (accounting for home field advantage but neglecting team strength) as calculated by Brian Burke of advancedfootballanalytics.com ^via Mike Beuoy^.

Games of Week 17, Ranked by Influence on Super Bowl Picture

Points of Interest

The detailed write-up on the important games of the week and what makes them important can be found here. That write-up, as well as this post, will continue to be updated through the course of the day, so check back before game time. I'll edit this message out when the posts are in their final form.

Previous Posts

See http://www.onlinesportsbetting.com/category/nfl/.