NYT Playoff Simulator is up for 2016

[DaFace]

I don't know about you guys, but I loved this thing last year. It's similar to cdcox's old forecasting software and is lots of fun for seeing how our chances at the playoffs shift in various scenarios.

League-wide view:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2...f-picture.html

Chiefs view:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2...f-picture.html

[DaFace]

Originally Posted by splatbass

They just look at every possible outcome for every game. They aren't figuring in which teams are better, injuries, or anything like that. Just all 32 teams and every possible combination of wins and losses. They run all of the hundreds of different outcomes, then take what percentage of those gets the outcome you are looking at (bye, 5th seed, etc.).

In other words, they see that the Chiefs need a win and the Raiders a loss for KC to win the division. It doesn't look at how likely the Chiefs are to beat SD or the Raiders to beat the Broncos, just that they need to win and the Raiders need to lose to get that outcome.

That's not quite true. It's based on Sagarin ratings, so its predictions are weighed based on a power rating of sorts.

In this case, the fact that Carr is injured certainly results in a slight overstatement of the likelihood of the Raiders beating the Broncos.