Football Outsiders 09' Win Projections

[DMBZeppelin]

This is a teams mean win projection. Not their projected record. So Lets say your team is at 7.9, you're projected to win 8 games. If you're 10.5 then you're right in between 10-11 wins.


NFC North
Chicago Bears - 10.5
Minnesota Vikings - 8.8
Green Bay Packers - 7.4
Detroit Lions - 5.8

NFC South
Carolina Panthers - 8.3
New Orleans Saints - 7.8
Tampa Bay Buccaneers - 7.2
Atlanta Falcons - 6.6

NFC East
New York Giants - 10.0
Philadelphia Eagles - 9.3
Dallas Cowboys - 8.0
Washington Redskins - 7.8

NFC West
Seattle Seahawks - 9.9
St. Louis Rams - 8.2
San Franciso 49ers - 5.7
Arizona Cardinals - 5.6

AFC North
Pittsburgh Steelers - 9.6
Baltimore Ravens - 8.8
Cincinnati Bengals - 6.9
Cleveland Browns - 6.6

AFC South
Indianapolis Colts - 11.5
Jacksonville Jaguars - 10.2
Tennessee Titans - 9.3
Houston Texans - 6.9

AFC East
New England Patriots - 11.4
Miami Dolphins - 6.4
New York Jets - 6.2
Buffalo Bills - 5.3

AFC West
San Diego Chargers - 12.5
Kansas City Chiefs - 6.7
Oakland Raiders - 6.0
Denver Broncos - 4.9

Super Bowl: San Diego Chargers over Chicago Bears

The San Diego Chargers are the prohibitive favorite to win Super Bowl XLIV. Our 2009 statistical projection for the Chargers is so off the charts that it may endanger the boundaries of reality.

In the six years that Football Outsiders has been doing preseason team projections, only one team has had a projection this impressive: the 2007 New England Patriots. In fact this year's Chargers enter the season looking even stronger than the Patriots did two years ago. The 2007 Patriots averaged 33.5% DVOA and 12.1 wins in our 10,000 preseason simulations. This Chargers team averages 40.3% DVOA and 12.5 wins in the preseason simulations. If they meet their average projection, they'll have the fourth-best DVOA of any team since 1994.

Here's an explanation on the win projection system. If this doesn't answer your question let me know and I'll post the explanation.

2009 Win Projection System

These projections stem from three equations that forecast 2009 DVOA for offense, defense, and special teams based on a number of different factors, including the previous two years of DVOA in various situations, improvement in the second half of 2008, recent draft history, coaching experiance, injury history, specific coaching styles, and the combined tenure of the offensive line.

These equations produce precise numbers representing the most likely outcome, but also produce a range of possibilities, used to determine the probability of each possible offensive, defensive, and special teams DVOA for each team. This is particularly important when projecting football teams, because with only 16 games in a season, a team's performance may vary wildly from its actual talent level due to a couple of random bounces of the ball or badly timed injuries. In addition, the economic structure of the NFL allows teams to make sudden jumps or drops in overall ability more often than in other sports.

To project wins, Dr. Benjamin Alamar created a simulation that plays out the entire schedule for each team using random draws of DVOA for each team's offense, defense, and special teams to calculate a final score for each game in each season. The values and frequencies of these DVOA rating are bsed on the projection equations described above. This game-by-game simulation also accounts for home-field advantage, warm-weather or dome-stadium team playing in the cold after November 1, and several other variables that can affect the outcome of each game. We ran the simulation 10,000 times, producing 10,000 unique seasons representing the full range of possibilities for each team in 2009. We then compared the results to the historical probability that a certain win total would be achieved in a 16-game NFL season, adjusting the simulation to produce more realistic number of 16-, 15-, 1- and 0-win seasons, as these are historically very low probability.

The resulting possible win totals are then separated into five categories:

• On the Clock (0-3 wins)
• Loserville (5-6 wins)
• Mediocrity (7-8 wins)
• Playoff Contender (9-10 wins)
• Super Bowl Contender (11+ wins)

The percentage given for each category is dependent not only on how good we project the team to be in 2009, but the level of variation possible in that projection, and the expected performance of the teams on the schedule. Each variable has a different impact on the variability of the projection. For example, offenses that were better through the air in 2008 have more variation in their 2009 projections than offenses that were better on the ground. Defensive improvement in the second half of last season leads to less variation, while rookie kicker or punter leads to more variation.

[cjkalt]

Well when you have a QB returning that isn't in the 08 stats doesn't that greatly affect it?