HomeWorldData[OC] It’s widely believed that preseason records in the NFL are meaningless. Is this true? Here is the combined regular season winning percentage of every undefeated and every winless preseason team in the past 10 years. (NFL, American Football)
[OC] It’s widely believed that preseason records in the NFL are meaningless. Is this true? Here is the combined regular season winning percentage of every undefeated and every winless preseason team in the past 10 years. (NFL, American Football)
August 28, 2024
[OC] It’s widely believed that preseason records in the NFL are meaningless. Is this true? Here is the combined regular season winning percentage of every undefeated and every winless preseason team in the past 10 years. (NFL, American Football)
Posted by JPAnalyst
9 comments
If preseason records mattered, the Ravens would have 6 Superbowls.
In NFL circles we like to talk about how preseason records are meaningless and of course, there’s always a few fans that get excited when their teams go 3-0 or disappointed when they go 0-3 despite the assumptions that there is no correlation between preseason and regular season success. I expected the analysis to prove this out, but I’ve never seen data to confirm this. If this analysis disproved the widely perceived notion, that would have been interesting as well. But here we are showing that preseason is meaningless. Sometimes it’s okay to prove water is wet, and not just take people’s word for it.
[deleted]
So there are four datapoints? Really confusing vis. You should do scatter plot if you are going to show continuous win % on left
Looks like they all regress to the mean.
Also, if you’ve seen Longlegs yet, that’s kind of ominous
Why don’t you just do a scatterplot of preseason win percentage vs season win percentage
This is pretty neat! I did have to read the legend and captions to really understand what was going on but once i did it was pretty easy to comprehend.
Wow I didn’t expect it to correlate much, but kind of crazy that it’s literally within a fraction of a percent
The oversized markers, unnecessarily connected lines, and that both lines shift to white make this pretty hard to read since it takes a second to realize that there are two separate lines. This could have been a 2×2 table that would have been much easier to read.
9 comments
If preseason records mattered, the Ravens would have 6 Superbowls.
Source for team records: [the football database](https://www.footballdb.com)
Chart: Excel
In NFL circles we like to talk about how preseason records are meaningless and of course, there’s always a few fans that get excited when their teams go 3-0 or disappointed when they go 0-3 despite the assumptions that there is no correlation between preseason and regular season success. I expected the analysis to prove this out, but I’ve never seen data to confirm this. If this analysis disproved the widely perceived notion, that would have been interesting as well. But here we are showing that preseason is meaningless. Sometimes it’s okay to prove water is wet, and not just take people’s word for it.
[deleted]
So there are four datapoints? Really confusing vis. You should do scatter plot if you are going to show continuous win % on left
Looks like they all regress to the mean.
Also, if you’ve seen Longlegs yet, that’s kind of ominous
Why don’t you just do a scatterplot of preseason win percentage vs season win percentage
This is pretty neat! I did have to read the legend and captions to really understand what was going on but once i did it was pretty easy to comprehend.
Wow I didn’t expect it to correlate much, but kind of crazy that it’s literally within a fraction of a percent
The oversized markers, unnecessarily connected lines, and that both lines shift to white make this pretty hard to read since it takes a second to realize that there are two separate lines. This could have been a 2×2 table that would have been much easier to read.