NFL Tournament of Champions Preview

My insanity knows no bounds. Well, maybe it does, since this project isn't as massive as the one from last year.

We're always looking to compare teams from today to legendary squads from the past. The sport is irrelevant. How do the Green Bay teams that won the first two Super Bowls compare with a team from today? Would those Cowboy and Niner teams of the 80's and 90's be as elite now as they were then? What if you send this year's champion X back to the hard-nosed 70's? This is a question I'm prepared to tackle (ha).

Like I did with the NBA last year, I'm going to run a Tournament of Champions for the NFL to decide who the best team of all time is. The stipulation to qualify is only that the teams in are Super Bowl winners. And since there are now 48 of them, a bracket actually makes sense. This is a little different than one that was run last year where each franchise had a representative and they played through a season. My argument here is that these 48 teams all ran through a gauntlet in their own times and cemented their place as legends already. If that means I exclude some of the all time great teams that could never win a title (looking at you, '07 Patriots), so be it.

Those of you who are mathematically inclined may note that with 48 teams, I can't run a straight up single elimination tournament like I did with the NBA. I need to grant byes. Sixteen of them, in fact. And for that, I need to fairly decide who to give them to. Ultimately, I turned to people who have already cranked out the math for me. Pro Football Reference has a fantastic database for just about everything one could ever want to know about the NFL. Fortunately, that includes Super Bowl history. Looking through each individual team page for their championship years, I can glean basic numbers like their records and overall scoring differential, but I then wanted to go a step further and use Expected Record, which uses those scoring differentials, and borrow PFR's "Simple Ranking System", which isn't perfect, nor is its creator clearly identified, but for the purposes of this tournament should do a fair job of sorting through these teams. The top 16 will be given automatic first round byes, while teams 17-48 will play an extra game. So without further ado, here's how the tournament will be set up.

Click bracket to enlarge

 To view an HTML link to the tournament bracket, click here.

When we think of the legends of the NFL, teams like the '85 Bears are often the first mentioned, so I wasn't surprised to see them at the #2 seed. Three of Green Bay's four Super Bowl champions get first round byes, which is awesome. The couple big surprises I found were the '72 Dolphins being ranked so low (they're the 14 seed), and I definitely didn't expect the formula to seed the '91 Redskins at the top. Interestingly enough, this year's Seattle team earned a first round bye and the #7 seed. The HTML version has seeds added to see exactly where each team ranked (and you can check the numbers on PFR's Super Bowl page linked above by clicking on each team's page).

I'm going to have this work in a similar fashion to the Death to the BCS Playoffs, in that there's only the one result, but to minimize the chance of flukes, I'll simulate these games best-of-three with the "clinching" game being the official result. I'll try to have the first round results on Friday. Should be fun!