Prediction Time

1st graph looks at team wins year over year since 2004.




Its pretty hard to read since there are so many teams all fit into one plot. Also since we are just looking at total wins, the ranges are pretty big. Kinda hard to get an impression of what is going unless you filter it team by team. But generally, the trends don't make huge jumps up or down in consecutive year ... although it does happen some.


So then we can look at the differential in wins for each team in consecutive years. Still a lot of data in 1 graph, but what you see is that all that data is shifted down and a little more densely packed ... this is because we are kind of 'normalizing' the data in a way (the data now doesn't discriminate based on how good teams were, just shows how they changed each year which is why it is more densely packed) When we look at the most densely packed area, it is in 1-4 win range .. this is where the majority of the changes are happening when looking at teams' records year to year.



Again, Still pretty hard to read since there are so many teams in one graph.

So lets just stop discriminating by teams as well, and just look at the NFL on a whole, how do the records change year to year. Thats what this next graph shows.





This shows all the changes in records year over year for the last 10 years. As you can see it is more heavily weighted to the 0-2 side. And the average over the last 10 years is a change in wins of ~3 wins per team.

So, while I know that we can't say with 100% certainty that just because a team was bad last year, they will be bad this year. We can use this as somewhat of an indicator. Typically we aren't seeing bad teams get really good, nor are we seeing good teams get really bad in just 1 year. (although you always have your outliers.)

 

And on the same token you have good teams that will be worse ... it all evens out.

 

You just made all that up didn't you?

 

But the best way to move up if you are down is picking up a franchise QB. Yes some will say Mariota is or isn't one of those , but if he is, team could move up faster for sure.