The Road To Winning The West

The Road To Winning The West

As we hit the middle of the season teams are starting to separate themselves, for the good or bad, from the pack. Optimism is high for some teams and their fans, while other teams are planning their fire sale of talent to rebuild. I would say the Kansas City Chiefs are an optimistic team in a top division, so I thought it would be fun to run some numbers and see what the trends are in the division.

The method I used was to pull together the statistics from the season to date concerning win/loss records of the teams overall, home/road, division/non-division, and vs winning/losing records. Once I got all of that together, I used it to project a win probability for each AFC West team for the rest of the year.  I did make a couple of “manual” adjustments where the data wasn’t adequate to properly project (such as only a game or two in a category).

Season Performance

There is lots of info in this table, so I will explain the columns that may not be too obvious. First Red is for the completed games and Gold is for the upcoming ones. The White section is a year to date summary of the Chiefs and the League.

1.         Opp Comb Record – Opponent’s Combined Record
2.         Opp Comb Win % – Opponent’s Combined Percentage of Wins
3.         Beat Opp Record – Opponent’s Opponents’ Record From Winning Games
4.         Beat Win % – Opponent’s Opponents’ Percentage of Wins From Winning Games
5.         Lost Opp Record – Opponent’s Opponents’ Record From Losing Games
6.         Lost Win % – Opponent’s Opponents’ Percentage of Wins From Losing Games
7.         W/L – Actual/Projected Win or Loss of Game
8.         Record – Running Record For The Season

Moving on to what we can see in this table. Columns for #s 3-6 help me get a sense of strength of the competition in a victory or loss. For instance, looking at the Chargers on the first line, they have a 3-5 record this year. If we look at their opponents in the 3 victories, those opponents are a combined 14-10 (58%), so the Chargers seem to be winning games against some of the best teams in the league. On the flip side, the opponents in their 5 losses are a combined 23-15 (61%), so they also lose to the top competition.

If you look down at the League line, you can see that the combined record is 49% wins, with 41% of the teams have a winning record, 13% are even, and 47% have losing records.

The Chiefs are at 71% wins and have played teams with a combined record of 27-27. The teams we have beaten are slightly below the league average of 49% and get beaten by teams well above the league average. This bodes well for the rest of the season, as it looks like most of our competition has a hard time beating teams with winning records. Additionally, it takes a team well above the league average for wins to beat us, which we only face 3 in the last 9 games (Denver twice though).

After that high-level look at our schedule and our competition, I thought I would slice it another way or two.  Home vs. Road, Division, and vs. Teams w/ Winning records are fairly standard ways we evaluate a team. So, here they are.

Chiefs Stats Projections

This table takes a look at win percentages in the Vs. Winning/Losing Records, Home/Road, Division/Non-Division, and Conference/Non-Conference games so far this year and projects them across the remaining games.

If those stats hold true, we would win another 6-7 games, putting us at 11-5 or 12-4. That should be good enough to compete for the division, but not a guaranteed win.

AFC West Team Stats Projections

Kansas City Chiefs

For this section, I did a similar analysis but, dropped the Conference/Non-Conference stat so it didn’t double dip. Additionally, I applied the performance level on a game-by-game basis based on the characteristics of that game. So, taking the JAX line as an example, we are playing a team with a losing record, at home, in a non-division game. Using a weighting process on those factors would take us to an 87% chance of winning the game. I then applied a W to all of the outcome percentages about 60%. This would again show us winning 7 of the final 9, ending up at 12-4.

Denver Broncos

For the Denver Broncos, I built that same table and applied a similar logic for the Wins, with the exceptions of two games, the first Oakland and the New England games.  My logic here was that I believed the limited number of games against teams with winning records and in the division was understating the impact for the Oakland matchup. For the England game, I think the Non-Division games are overstating the impact there, along with the historical performance of Tom Brady vs. the Broncos. This would leave the Broncos winning 6 of their last 8, bringing them to 12-4 for the year.

Oakland Raiders

Here is the table for the Raiders remaining games.  As you can see in this table, the Raiders seem to be padding their stats against Non-Division teams with Losing records. When we project out the rest of the season, and they start playing the teams with winning records, their record is expected to correct. I applied Ws for all Outcome % above 60%.  The Denver game at 28% also provide further support for showing Denver’s as a W. This would have Oakland going 4-4 on the back half of the season and winding up at 10-6.

San Diego Chargers

The results for the Chargers, shown above, shows they get some favorable matchups on the rest of the season. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to be enough to overtake the rest of the division. In this case, none of the games calculate out at over 60%, however I did identify 4 games as probable wins.  In looking at games they lost, several were very close and could have gone either way. This would lead to a slight understating of their results, so I dropped the percentage to 50% and then added in Cleveland. I just don’t see Phillip Rivers losing to the Browns, even in Cleveland.

Pulling It All Together

After looking through all of that information, I pulled it together in another summary table to show it as a full division for the season.

The cells in Yellow are projected-games for the remainder of the season.  As you can see, KC and Denver end up in an Overall W/L Record tie, but we would get the tiebreaker based on Division Record.

While, as the saying goes, no game is a gimme, the projections seem pretty reasonable. Of course, things like injuries and severe lapses in player/coach performance can turn a game the wrong way. You can also not count out the desire of a team that is hungry for a win or any division game.

What do you guys think? Have I missed the boat? I’d like to hear your thoughts on this, until then, there’s The Rub.