I spent much of my morning today testing out different playoff scenarios in the sim and have come to the same conclusions as @infinitempg posted in his great article earlier today. Sadly he beat me to the punch in describing the scenarios, so I bring instead a playoff machine that you can use to evaluate the likelihood of different playoff scenarios unfolding:
It should hopefully be fairly self explanatory to use. On the "Machine" page, simply change the listed probabilities for each team to win their Week 16 games and the Playoff Scenarios table will automatically spit out the estimated probabilities of each team's playoff seed. If you want to see a specific playoff scenario (i.e. what happens if Colorado beats Honolulu), you can set that cell to 100 or 0 to guarantee a win or loss for that team, respectively.
NOTE: It needs to generate 4000 random numbers and do some computation in order to estimate the probabilities, so it may take a little bit to load after the game probabilities are changed.
I have made the game probability cells publicly editable, so feel free to play with it directly - I don't think you'll be able to break something. If you're looking at it soon after this article is posted and don't want to fight with a bunch of other random users over it, make a copy yourself to play with.
Another quick note is that I assumed equal probability for each team winning a points for tiebreaker in this spreadsheet, since trying to incorporate that on top of everything seemed too complex. This means that Sarasota's probability of winning a tiebreak against Chicago (for the 1st seed) or Colorado (for the 3rd seed) is likely underestimated, since they are currently leading the PF tiebreak by fairly healthy margins against both teams.
Finally, to provide a little bit of content that doesn't require messing around with a spreadsheet to get, I put in what I thought were fairly reasonable probabilities for the Week 16 games and got the following outcomes:
- CHI 95% to beat BAL
- YKW 60% to beat PHI
- COL 45% to beat HON
- SAR 70% to beat BER
Chicago
1st Seed: 64.4%
2nd Seed: 35.4%
3rd Seed: 0.2%
Out of Playoffs: 0.0%
Sarasota
1st Seed: 35.6%
2nd Seed: 41.8%
3rd Seed: 17.8%
Out of Playoffs: 4.8%
Yellowknife
1st Seed: 0.0%
2nd Seed: 19.6%
3rd Seed: 61.6%
Out of Playoffs: 18.8%
Colorado
1st Seed: 0.0%
2nd Seed: 3.1%
3rd Seed: 20.4%
Out of Playoffs: 76.4%
I hope you find the machine useful and enjoyable, and good luck to everyone on making the playoffs!
It should hopefully be fairly self explanatory to use. On the "Machine" page, simply change the listed probabilities for each team to win their Week 16 games and the Playoff Scenarios table will automatically spit out the estimated probabilities of each team's playoff seed. If you want to see a specific playoff scenario (i.e. what happens if Colorado beats Honolulu), you can set that cell to 100 or 0 to guarantee a win or loss for that team, respectively.
NOTE: It needs to generate 4000 random numbers and do some computation in order to estimate the probabilities, so it may take a little bit to load after the game probabilities are changed.
I have made the game probability cells publicly editable, so feel free to play with it directly - I don't think you'll be able to break something. If you're looking at it soon after this article is posted and don't want to fight with a bunch of other random users over it, make a copy yourself to play with.
Another quick note is that I assumed equal probability for each team winning a points for tiebreaker in this spreadsheet, since trying to incorporate that on top of everything seemed too complex. This means that Sarasota's probability of winning a tiebreak against Chicago (for the 1st seed) or Colorado (for the 3rd seed) is likely underestimated, since they are currently leading the PF tiebreak by fairly healthy margins against both teams.
Finally, to provide a little bit of content that doesn't require messing around with a spreadsheet to get, I put in what I thought were fairly reasonable probabilities for the Week 16 games and got the following outcomes:
- CHI 95% to beat BAL
- YKW 60% to beat PHI
- COL 45% to beat HON
- SAR 70% to beat BER
Chicago1st Seed: 64.4%
2nd Seed: 35.4%
3rd Seed: 0.2%
Out of Playoffs: 0.0%
Sarasota1st Seed: 35.6%
2nd Seed: 41.8%
3rd Seed: 17.8%
Out of Playoffs: 4.8%
Yellowknife1st Seed: 0.0%
2nd Seed: 19.6%
3rd Seed: 61.6%
Out of Playoffs: 18.8%
Colorado1st Seed: 0.0%
2nd Seed: 3.1%
3rd Seed: 20.4%
Out of Playoffs: 76.4%
I hope you find the machine useful and enjoyable, and good luck to everyone on making the playoffs!
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