Wednesday, January 05, 2011

Superbowl simulations - matchups and winners

I am struggling to find the best way to present the data from my simulations of the football playoffs. The key to picking a good roster is to figuring out which teams play multiple games in the playoffs, essentially the ones that make it to the Superbowl. Thus I compiled 10,000 simulations of the playoffs and then determined who the AFC and NFC champions would be that would meet in the Superbowl and who the winner of that game would be. The pie charts below try to capture all of the outcomes from 12.5% chance that NE will beat ATL in the Superbowl to the less than 1 in 10,000 chance that SEA and KC would meet in the Superbowl.


The chart below is a filter of the above data with only NE or PIT as AFC champion, and ATL, CHI or GB as the NFC champion.


The Pareto below shows the top 15 outcomes for matchups in the Superbowl. They represent 78% of the outcomes of the simulations.


The matchups of either NE or PIT vs. either ATL, CHI or GB represent 68% of the outcomes of the simulations. The only wrinkle left there is which team will dominate the game an and so the makeup of the rosters to cover those possibilities. The results are heavily waited to not only a NE appearance in the Superbowl but also to a NE win.

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