Caution football fans! The chart you are about to enjoy is so hot it might burn your retina. And if you avoid this chart (below) it will burn a hole in your postseason wallet.

 

It is a compendium of how each playoff team performed this year against Quality Opponents and it’s so accurate at picking playoff winners that we let it shoot beer cans off the heads of our children. 

 

ColdHardFootballFacts.com introduced the Quality Wins Quotient in 2004 and if you used it and absolutely no other factor to pick playoff winners that year you would have nailed 10 of 11 postseason games. It repeated the improbable 10-1 mark picking postseason winners last year. Only in 2005 did the Quality Wins Quotient fail to nail the postseason outcome, with a 5-6 mark.

 

But you'll see that nobody fared well picking winners in 2005 thanks to one team: the Steelers and their improbable run from 11-5 No. 6 seed to Super Bowl champion. Pittsburgh that year beat teams with better Quality Records in three of four postseason victories. Of course, nobody envisioned Pittsburgh’s run to the Super Bowl. It was just one of those rare triumphs for the human factor. After all, there's a reason why humans and not numbers play the game, and it's the same reason we watch the games: no matter what the most careful and accurate analysis tells you, it will never be correct all the time.

 

Still, our Quality Wins Quotient boasts a remarkable record of picking playoff winners in the three years since we introduced it.

 

Since 2004:

 

The 2006 Colts provide a textbook example of how Quality Record trumps overall record. The 2006 Colts were a mere 12-4 overall last year, fourth best in the NFL behind 14-2 San Diego, 13-3 Baltimore and 13-3 Chicago.

 

But the Colts were the No. 1 team vs. Quality Opponents last year.  The Colts won the Super Bowl.

 

And, of course, they beat two teams with better overall records along the way: the Ravens and Bears.

 

And, again, for us, this 25-8 record vs. Quality Opponents is if you consider NO OTHER FACTOR other than performance against Quality Opponents. The few games that the Quality Wins Quotient had wrong in these three years often pitted teams with the narrowest differential vs. Quality Opponents.

 

For example, the one game it got wrong in 2004 was Atlanta at Philly in the NFC championship game. Each team went 2-1 vs. Quality Opponents. Atlanta had the most narrow advantage imaginable in point differential. The 2004 Falcons outscored Quality Opponents by 4.0 PPG. The 2004 Eagles outscored Quality Opponents by 3.7 PPG. (We use scoring differential as the tiebreaker for teams with like records.)

 

But the Falcons were an 11-5 dome team from the Deep South heading to chilly Philly against a 13-3 team. Clearly, a smart football fan who looked at the Quality Standings, noticed the sliver of a difference in performance against Quality Opponents and took into consideration these other key factors (dome team in cold), might have been inclined to side with the Eagles over the Falcons. And clearly, that would have been the right choice.

 

We still receive e-mails from folks pretty regularly saying our system is simplistic or flawed. But anyone can go through complex machinations to create obscure comparions. There is, however, a brilliance in simplicity; a genius in a system that's incredibily accurate yet so simple anyone can understand it and explain it. Plus, these critics have yet to produce a better, more accurate and more easy to understand system.

 

So, we stand correct until further notice.

 

Now, on to this year’s comparison. The short history of the Quality Wins Quotient tells us that teams higher on this list will beat teams lower on this list, as they have in 25 of the 33 playoff games since we unleashed this method upon an unsuspecting football world.

 

Drink up and enjoy.

Couple key considerations:

 

AFC – Pittsburgh chimes in at No. 2 in the AFC, behind only New England. But when considering playoff match-ups it might pay to remember that Indy laid down against Tennessee in the final game of the year. Of course, the results are the results. We don’t know what would have happened had Indy gone all-out. We can only work with the data we have. Plus, the Colts are not the first team to pack it in at the end of season over the last three years. And our Quality Wins Quotient has marched on undaunted.

 

NFC – Green Bay checks in at No. 1 in the NFC and No. 2 overall behind New England. Yes, we know the history. We know Brett Favre has never won in Dallas, which will host the Packers if they meet again. We know Dallas beat Green Bay earlier this year. But we also know that if the Good Brett Favre shows up for a rematch, instead of the Rex Grossman/Old Yeller hybrid we saw throw the game away (2 bad picks) in their regular-season meeting, that the Packers have a very good shot of winning a rematch. But as we said before, humans play games. Not stats.

Vegas Favorites – 6-5

Better Overall Record – 6-5

Quality Wins Quotient – 10-1

Vegas Favorites – 8-3

Better Overall Record – 7-4