Shawn Siegele breaks down all the remaining playoff teams for those participating in playoff contests or wanting to get a deeper feel for the reality tournament.
This week’s exercise will be a bit different than last week’s contrarian takes. For the eight remaining teams, I’ve used the RotoViz tools, the deep trove of SIS data, and Blair’s matchup tool with a mix of regular and NextGen data to rank the playoff teams in the following categories: quarterback, offensive skill positions, offensive lines, pass rush, pass defense, and run defense.
In order to dominate the FFPC Playoff Challenge 2 or any other playoff contest, you need to get a feel for which teams are most likely to win compared to the field’s expectation. In this era of advanced analytics, the edges are smaller, but perhaps more exploitable at the same time, especially when looking at the evolving nature of some units. It also helps to understand how individual team strengths will contribute to matchup-based outcomes this weekend.
Although we’ve been discussing many of these teams and players for months, this exercise forces me to dive back into the data, question my assumptions, and provide evidence for every ranking. The resulting rankings are an attempt to process the big picture, while occasionally teasing meaningful information from areas where sources appear to have conflicting data or where that data is counterintuitive. I’ve watched every game all season. How do the stats fit within that context?
It’s a fun process for me, and hopefully it’s both interesting and actionable on the reader side.
Ranking Every Component of the Remaining NFL Playoff Teams
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Conventions note: Stats are full-season unless noted, with the exception of stats from Blair’s matchup tool. These stats focus on the most predictive group of games. It gets a little tricky down the stretch due to many teams taking Week 18 off, and then only a small group play in the Wild Card round. In this case, stats refer to Weeks 12 through 17, but I’ve tried to generally point out contrasts to full-season numbers when relevant.
Before we get into the team rankings, let’s create a bit of context by looking at what they were up against this season.
