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NFL Slipping and Sliding.

Since college football is my primary focus and I have been writing my college football magazine much longer than my NFL magazine, I first test almost every rating or prediction system that I use as a prediction tool using college football statistics.  After I develop the system for college football, I then try to apply the system to the NFL.  My college football “Stock Market Indicator” is an outlier, however, as I first developed it successfully for use in the NFL, where the level of parity is greater and teams are more likely to bunch at or around the .500 level over an extended period of time. 

In my NFL magazine (pg. 24 this year), I call this topic “Slipping and Sliding” rather than “Stock Market” because the measurement is different than for college football, but the basic premise is the same.  Simply put, I look at teams that have made a significant jump or decline in a given year and test whether they will continue improving or declining in the following year. As mentioned above and as I have pointed out in my blog posts and in my magazine, there is a great deal of parity in the NFL so it stands to reason that a team that improves substantially from year to year will likely struggle to maintain that level of success, and vice versa.

To test this theory, I started to chart the NFL teams and noted which teams made the biggest improvement in their record from the previous season. As I expected, the teams that made the biggest improvement generally slide back some the following year. In the NFL from 2002-'12, there were 93 teams that improved their record by 3 wins or more from the previous season. Of those 93 teams only 16 had a better record, 10 had the same record and 67 had a weaker record, meaning that a team did not improve or had a weaker record 82.8% of the time. The 2004 Steelers & Chargers had the biggest improvements from early in my research. Pittsburgh went from 6-10 to 15-1 (+9 wins) while San Diego went from 4-12 to 12-4 (+8 wins). In the season after their big improvement, the Steelers slid by 4 wins (15-1 to 11-5) and the Chargers declined by 3 wins (12-4 to 9-7).  Other examples include Miami, which went from 1-15 season in 2007 to 11-5 in '08 (+10 wins), but slid back to 7-9 the next season (-4 wins), and Tampa Bay, which was +7 wins from '09 to '10 (10-6) before plummeting to 4-12 (-6 wins). 

Based upon these results, I can categorize the teams that are likely to decline and place them on my “Going Down” list, which includes all teams with 3 or more wins from the previous year.  As detailed in my magazine, the results have held quite well with 72% of the teams on the list having a worse record from the year before.  Looking back to last year, 4 of the 6 teams on the “Going Down” list from 2014 saw their record either stay the same or get weaker, led by Carolina and New Orleans with declines of 4.5 and 4 wins, respectively, to find themselves on the opposite list this year.

Generally, these charts are a two-way street and it has been just as good of an indicator going in the opposite direction. As I did with teams that showed a 3+ game improvement, I took the teams that had 3+ fewer wins from the previous year and found that the numbers weren't quite as strong as I would have liked. By tweaking the chart to use teams that had a decrease of 4 or more wins from the previous season, I got the results I was seeking.  Since 2002, there have been 78 teams whose win total has dropped by 4 or more from the previous year and 58 (74.3%) have had a better record. Of the teams that had a weaker record by 6 or more wins an amazing 28 out of 30 (93.3%) improved their record. LY 4 teams made the list and all four teams improved, led by Houston's massive 7 win turnaround on the heels of a -10 win free fall in 2013.  As you can see below, however, Houston’s major turnaround puts them right back on the “Going Down” list for 2015.

With an eye on this year, here are the seven teams from 2014 that had their record improve by 3 wins or more and thus have a 72% chance of having a weaker record this year. While there were no improvements as dramatic as KC from last year (+9), there are seven teams in this category compared to six from a year ago:

• Houston (+7 wins)
• Dallas (+4 wins)
• Detroit (+4 wins)
• Pittsburgh (+3 wins)
• Buffalo (+3 wins)
• Green Bay (+3 wins)
• Cleveland (+3 wins)

Next, here are the teams that fall into the “Going Up” bucket, which gives them a 74% chance of improvement based on past results:

• Tennessee (-5 wins)
• Carolina (-4.5 wins)
• St. Louis (-4 wins)
• New Orleans (-4 wins)
• New York Jets (-4 wins)

                                                           
Finally, here are all the teams since 2006 that have either improved or worsened by 6 or more wins. Combined, these two scenarios are 33-1-2 (97.2%)!  The team to buck the trend was the Minnesota Vikings, which went from 12-4 in 2009 to 6-10 in 2010 and then fell even farther in 2011 to 3-13.
           
Teams that were -6 or more wins:

Teams that were +6 or more wins:

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