NFL

With the NFC retiring for the week by Sunday afternoon I was able to fire up the Commodore64 to run things in that conference for the next week.

Notes, observations, and possible facts:

• The Vikings at 6-4 have slightly better odds than the Cowboys at 6-3 to make the playoffs (using 50/50 coin flip probabilities for each game) owing to their far better conference record and h2h wins over some possible contenders the Cowboys do not have.
• Computer found some wacky paths to the playoffs with just 6 wins for ATL, CAR, TBB, GBP, MIN, NYG, ARI. Everybody else it didn't see anything under 7 wins **. DET and PHI have already hit that mark and could theorectically not show up anymore and still make it.
• It spit out ATL as the only team that could reach as few as 11 wins and be guaranteed a playoff spot (if ATL wins out they become the NFC South champions). It said NOS, TBB, DET, MIN, DAL, PHI, SFF, SEA if reach 12 wins would make the playoffs no matter what **.
• CAR, CHI, GBP, NYG, WAS, LAR, ARI definitively do not control their own destiny. Everyone else likely still does **.
• The win number most realistically likely to be good enough for at least a wildcard spot is 9.5. Since that is difficult to do, call it 10 should be safe with 9 having decent odds of sneaking in or being in a tiebreak situation.
• Mathematically likely number of wins needed to win each division (2nd place +1W or win tiebreak) is around: East 11-12, North 10-11, South 9-10, West 10-11.
• There are no playoff clinching or eliminating scenarios for week 11. My program doesn't do seeds, just in or out. I also don't factor in the possibility of tie games, at least until the last week or so) as it makes things incomphrensible for something with so little chance of happening.
• Bye weeks make this a little fuzzy, but it looks like the absolute earliest PHI could clinch a playoff spot is in 3 weeks.
• The odds of an NFC South team competing for the wildcard are, technically speaking, not good.

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** The C64 runs an awful lot of scenarios and has some semi-logic trying to hunt down these numbers and pin them down, but at this stage of the season it does not run through every last possible scenario of the bazillion left, so while it can definitively tell what teams do not control their own destiny, and the other numbers marked with an asterisk are very very solid, there might be some one in 5 bazillion scenario(s) in which they are not perfectly perfect and there may be some unlikely scenario in which a team it shows as controlling its own destiny actually does not. It does do far more intensive calculations than simple magic number calculations which don't factor in the effects of team B playing team C have on team A, fwiw.