A Numerical Look At A Seattle Seahawk Victory

Ever wonder exactly how much any one play mattered toward the outcome of a game? Ever consider if you could quantify that? Probably not, but I’m a pretty big nerd, so I do.

The good thing is that someone else has already spent the time and energy to figure it all out, so I didn’t have to. The guys over at Advanced NFL Stats already did all the work, and quite awesomely put all the results on the web. The even auto-generate some pretty awesome graphs of all the data too, and do so fairly close to real time. Take a look:

That’s the Seahawks game. The top of the graph is 100% chance of a Seahawks victory, and the bottom is a Seahawk loss. It’s all probability, but it might as well be how I felt over the course the game. I think that graph would match up perfectly.

I’ve labeled a few key plays so you can see how much one play can effect the likelihood of winning. The Pick-6 is pretty obvious, especially since it gave up the lead, and thus pushed the probability curve under 50%.

They also rate each player based on their contribution, but that part of their analysis is still coming around so I wont put all of it on here. Though I don’t think it’ll hurt anything to mention the top and bottom players.