Team comps

Columns. Off, Def and ST are offense, defense and special teams in standard deviations from the average team after the same number of games; plus is better on all three, and +1.0 is roughly the league's top sixth. Off pass, Off rush, Def pass and Def rush split the offense and defense numbers by play type. They are shown for context and do not pick the comps. Match is the distance from the selected team on offense, defense and special teams combined; lower is closer. Final and Playoffs are the comp's regular-season record and how its playoffs ended. Cell color compares each number with an average team: teal better, brick worse.

nflverse play-by-play, regular season, 1999 to date. Offense and defense are expected points added per play on passes and runs, adjusted for the opponents each team has faced and for home field, with blowout snaps (a win probability under 5% or over 95%) left out. Special teams is expected points added per game on kickoffs, punts, field goals and extra points, not adjusted for opponents.

Teams are lined up by games played, not by calendar week, so a team after three games is only compared with other teams after three games. Byes and postponed games would otherwise compare a two-game sample with a three-game one. Each number is then expressed against every team at the same point since 1999.

The comps are the 12 earlier team-seasons closest on offense, defense and special teams, with special teams counting half because it is the least stable of the three from year to year. These settings were chosen once, before testing, and were not tuned. Relocated franchises appear under the name they had that season and use today's logo.

Do the comps predict anything? We wrote down the test before running it, then ran it once: every team from 2006 to 2025, after each of games 2 through 10 (5,760 cases), predicting the rest of the season from comps drawn only from earlier seasons. The comps were off by 16.7 percentage points of win rate on average. A simple formula using the same three numbers plus the team's record was off by 16.1, and the team's record alone by 16.5. The formula's edge held at every point in the season and is larger than chance would explain (95% range 0.4 to 0.9 points). The comps were also worse at saying who makes the playoffs. They are shown here as history: what happened to teams that looked like this one.