For those who celebrate, happy post-Halloween. Hopefully, like me, you got to dress up as a Disney character against your will and eat peanut butter cups for dinner. The idea of putting on a facade, or a mask, is an interesting one at this time of year, where we’re left to wonder which of the teams who have good records are actually good and which of them will make the playoffs, chests puffed, only to get chopped down to size when the real contenders get involved. Sort of like me in a Kristoff outfit (from Frozen).
Specifically, you wonder whether some of the teams who have really good records are just on the very outer reaches of their best-case scenario and some of the teams who have horrible records are just buried beneath the wonkiness of this season.
The analytic sports experts Ben Baldwin and Mike Beuoy release each Monday a list of market-derived team tiers. Basically, it’s a chart that shows how favored a team would be on a neutral field against a league-average opponent. Obviously, the Bills are way out ahead at +10.6 points, while the Texans are a league-worst -8.1.
