NFL Playoff Implications Week 15

Here are the playoff implications for the NFL's week 15 games. The purpose of this feature is to highlight games that have a significant impact on the playoff picture (see this post for background).

The playoff implications below are derived from a 50,000 round simulation of the remainder of the NFL season. I use my daily NFL rankings to simulate future games. I can group the simulation runs by the outcome of each game and then see how a team's playoff chances vary between the two groups. The interactive table at the bottom of the post will allow you to see corresponding results for any game or team. The results of the three Thanksgiving games have already been taken into account in the tables below.

Ranking Week 15 Games by Leverage

The table below ranks the week 15 games by total leverage. Leverage in this context is a measure of both how uncertain a game's outcome is (games between evenly matched teams have higher leverage) and how much the playoff picture swings as a result of that outcome.

GameLeverage
HOU @ IND 80.5%
CAR @ NYG 37.9%
DEN @ PIT 32.3%
BUF @ WAS 25.5%
CHI @ MIN 19.7%
ARZ @ PHI 19.0%
NYJ @ DAL 15.8%
KC @ BAL 14.5%
ATL @ JAC 5.9%
CLE @ SEA 2.1%
DET @ NO 1.8%
GB @ OAK 0.7%
CIN @ SF 0.1%
MIA @ SD 0.0%
TEN @ NE 0.0%

This week's game between Houston and Indianapolis seems almost intelligently designed for maximum leverage. The teams are fairly evenly matched (the Colts are a 1 to 2 point favorite as of this morning), and the loser will see their playoff probability drop to single digits. As The Upshot puts it, in their fantastic playoff implications feature, this is a de facto divisional championship game.

Beyond Week 15

We can also use the simulation dataset to look ahead to the remainder of the season and see which games (based on what we know now) will have significant playoff implications. The table below shows the top 10 week 16-17 games by total leverage.

WeekGameLeverage
16 WAS @ PHI 63.9%
17 PHI @ NYG 43.9%
17 NYJ @ BUF 37.7%
16 NE @ NYJ 37.5%
16 NYG @ MIN 31.9%
16 PIT @ BAL 30.6%
17 PIT @ CLE 29.6%
17 JAC @ HOU 27.6%
17 WAS @ DAL 23.9%
16 HOU @ TEN 23.8%

Week 15 Cheat Sheet

And here is your cheat sheet for week 15. You can filter by game or team below. I have already filtered out any games that aren't statistically significant to a team's playoff chances.

Select Game: OR Select Team:

home team:
gamegame probteamplayoff probloseswinsswingleverage
HOU @ IND 50.3% IND 50.3% 9.8% 90.3% 80.5% 40.2%
HOU @ IND 50.3% HOU 45.5% 83.7% 7.8% -76.0% 38.0%
HOU @ IND 50.3% JAC 4.2% 6.5% 2.0% -4.5% 2.2%
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