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The original was posted on /r/nfl by /u/JPAnalyst on 2024-08-28 17:46:52+00:00.
Original Title: [OC] It’s widely believed that preseason records in the NFL are meaningless. Is this true? I looked at the combined regular season winning percentage of every undefeated and every winless preseason team in the past 10 years to find out.
The Bears just went 4-0 this preseason. The Jets went 3-0. But they tell us that “it’s meaningless”. They say pump the brakes…that this doesn’t translate to regular season success. How a team’s second stringers perform vs another teams 3rd stringers, and how their 3rd stringers perform against someone’s 4th stringers , or how your first stringers did on 6 snaps, and how their vanilla plays work against another team’s vanilla plays might not translate on a small sample size of games. But doesn’t it make logical sense that doing something better in practice or preseason means you’re probably somewhat better in real games?
Look at some of these undefeated preseason teams from the past, and where they ended up in the regular season:
- 2019 BAL, 14-2
- 2013 SEA, 13-3
- 2021 KC, 12-5
- 2021 BUF, 11-6
- 2015 KC, 11-5
And check out how some of these winless preseason teams ended up in the regular season.
- 2023 CAR, 2-15
- 2016 CLE, 1-15
- 2021 NYG, 4-13
- 2021 DET, 3-13
- 2013 ATL, 4-12
- 2019 DET, 3-12
Carolina showed us who they were in the preseason last year, and it played out in the regular season. There are many examples we can look at to suggest that there is some meaning to pre-season records as it relates to regular season success.
Or maybe, I just did what people do all the time in sports (and politics) and I cherry-picked data to form a false narrative. “Look at what Carolina did! Last year”, “2016 Browns have entered the chat!”, “*The 2013 Super Bowl champion Seahawks might have something to say about preseason records!”…*you know how we do this.
So now that we had fun with a few data points, let’s look at the larger data set and dig a little deeper…I took a 10-year sample size of preseason games (I went back 11 years, because there were no PS games in 2020 due to COVID). The process was manual because I’m not good at data extraction, so I decided to focus only on the teams that won every PS game and teams that lost every PS game and calculated the regular season winning percentage for those two groups of teams. The results emphatically support the lack of correlation between preseason success and regular season success.
My goal wasn’t to confirm or disprove the notion that preseason doesn’t correlate with regular season W-L. My goal was to just to find out. The results were astoundingly consistent with common knowledge that there is no correlation. Each of the two groups (the 1.000 winning % group and the 0.000 winning % group, showed positive and negative regression after pre-season ending at virtually the same point (slightly below .500) in the regular season, suggesting no preseason and regular season W-L correlation.
If this analysis disproved the narrative, that would have been interesting as well. But here we are showing that preseason is meaningless. Sometimes it’s okay to objectively prove that water is wet.
Note, I think an even better way would be to use all pre-season records and all regular season records, and run a scatter plot to show the lack of correlation, but as I said, I had trouble extracting the data, so I didn’t go that route