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The original was posted on /r/nfl by /u/DocMarlowe on 2026-03-02 17:56:14+00:00.
Hello everyone,
Now that we’re in the offseason, I wanted to reflect on the past season of football and the sport in general. Since there are so few games, unlike baseball or basketball, the entire league can shift with just a few fluke plays. Some might question the wisdom of letting millionaires playing catch dictate your mental health as you drag yourself to work on Monday morning, especially for a game that can seem arbitrary or completely unfair. Now, instead of trying to come up with a way to make the sport more stable, I’ve decided to go the completely opposite direction. I want this game to be more bullshit and arbitrary, so I took inspiration from the most bullshit, arbitrary, and unfair game of all time, Mario Party.
Now, most of you are already familiar with how brutal Mario Party can be. While you have some control over the minigames and general strategies, your success ultimately depends on the dice block, chance encounters, and being in the right place at the right time. While a skilled player might be able to get some advantage, circumstances outside your control will still sometimes turn against you, allowing someone with no business winning to fluke their way into the top spot.
On top of that, Mario Party still has Bonus Stars awarded at the end of the game. Bonus Stars are random after each game, so even if you played the hand you were dealt perfectly, the Bonus Stars can tilt the game away from you at the very last minute based on stuff like who landed on the most chance spaces, or who rolled the lowest overall. I wanted to add this to the NFL.
So here are the rules. At the end of each game, I wanted to tack on bonus points to the final score based on stuff like passing yards, sacks, turnovers, and penalty yards. At the end of each game, I’d count up the stats, award the bonus stars, and see what the new final score was. For example, if there was a game that was 20-17, with 6 bonus stars going to the home team, and 1 to the away team, the score would flip to 21-23. In order to prevent ties, I gave the team that won in real life a half point, making the calculated score 21.5-23.
So, I sat down and started vibecoding my way to re-writing the 2025 season. I started with the nflreadpy dataset, which breaks down every play in any given season. After importing all of the plays, I calculated the various stats and made 14 different categories, where the program would randomly pick 7. The categories were as follows
- Passing Yards
- Rushing Yards
- Takeaways
- Sacks
- Third Down Conversion %
- Number of Red Zone TDs
- Average Starting Field Position
- Penalty Yards
- Total Field Goal Distance
- Total Punt Distance
- Red Zone Percentage
- Yards per Play
- Number of 4th Down Attempts
- Total Plays Ran on Offense
After the categories were selected, I’d also have it decide whether or not it was asking for the most or least of a category, much like Mario Party can be something like highest or lowest total movement, giving us a total of 28 possible options, and 1,184,040 unique draws.
I experimented with various point values, starting with 1 point, but it only ended up flipping 6 games total. Awarding a field goal for each bonus star flipped 10% of total games, and awarding a touchdown averaged 29%, which was enough chaos to make this fun, but it still means something to actually win the game.
So, using the seed “wediditreddit!” to generate the hash for the RNG, this was the result of the 2025 season. Tie breakers in this scenario were total bonus stars.
After messing with that, I wanted to see what the average of all of this was, so I had the script run 500 simulations of the season, find outliers, and generate the average standings. The average flips were around 29% of games, so Cleveland becoming the #1 seed is rare, but the season itself was not an outlier.
So that’s that! If anyone wants to play around with this, here is the Google Colab sheet. Just make a copy and mess around with the variables at the top of the script. There are some wild scenarios that can kick off with this.