2014 NFL Tournament of Champions Second Round: Joe Montana Bracket

I'm trying to crank out a bunch of these today, given how busy the coming weekend is going to be. Four teams have already fallen today, with 28 still standing. Four more will fall in the next few minutes of your reading.

The Joe Montana Bracket will largely put its name on display in this round, with three of his Super Bowl-winning teams doing battle. Unfortunately for him, one of them is guaranteed to be eliminated. It's just a question of which. We also have the top seed of the tournament ready to go today, so we'll see if they can hold serve.

So as we prepare for the second battle of the second round, a quick reminder of how this works: I will simulate these games as a best-of-three, with the "clinching" game being the official result. I'll try to take weather forecasts to paint as accurate a picture of the conditions as possible. All simulations are provided by WhatIfSports.com. Let's play.

2014 NFL Tournament of Champions Second Round: Larry Csonka Bracket

Another week gone by, and another stretch of football stuff is coming here on COAS. In my eternal quest to determine the best of the best in sports, last week I started up the NFL Tournament of Champions. After last weekend, we have eliminated 16 of the 48 Super Bowl champions, and this weekend I'm going to eliminate another 16. But with 32 teams left, all the byes are out of the picture, so we're really bringing the best of the best into play.

I wanted to try to keep the order of brackets relatively similar, but not in the exact same order, so I'm going to start with the Larry Csonka Bracket for this round. His back-to-back Dolphin teams that won Super Bowls appear in this round, but the top seed in this bracket belongs to Brett Favre and the '96 Packers. Will we continue to rock chalk?

To find out, we'll simulate these four matchups as a best-of-three, with the "clinching" game being the official result. I will try to take weather into account as best I can. All simulations are provided by WhatIfSports.com. Let's start Round 2.

2014 NFL Tournament of Champions First Round: Terry Bradshaw Bracket

With all the chaos yesterday, I didn't get a chance to finish up the first round of the NFL Tournament of Champions. Twelve teams have already fallen with four more left to go. You can see yesterday's results from the John Elway bracket here.

So far the home teams have by and large held serve, and it'll be interesting to see if the trend can be held today. There's an awful lot of black and gold in this bracket, with three Steeler incarnations going today, including two at home. We have a pretty stacked set of byes in this bracket as well, so there will be some fun next week as well.

We've had a fair amount of the games so far need the third simulation, which just means these teams are by and large evenly matched. Then again, there have been a few shutouts as well, which is a little unexpected. I'm sure that will go away as we eliminate more teams.

This round, we're going to stick with the system that has worked thus far. All games will be simulated as a best-of-three, with the "clinching" game going into the system as the official result. I'll try to take accurate weather from each of the locations as best as I can. All simulations are once again provided by WhatIfSports.com. Let's play a little more football.

2014 NFL Tournament of Champions First Round: John Elway Bracket

Hope you all had a wonderful Valentine's Day! I'm still doing one more celebration of it tonight with my fiancee. Until such time, I wanted to attack this age old question a little further.

Yesterday I eliminated eight of the 48 Super Bowl champions in history, and today I will eliminate eight more. We'll start with four though, since I'm doing this by bracket. If you want to see how we got to where we are so far, you can view yesterday's results from the Joe Montana and Larry Csonka brackets at the respective links.

So today, the namesake of this bracket sees both of his title teams go at it, both times at home. We also have a battle of New Jersey (because let's face it: the New York thing is a misnomer and always will be). These games are just an appetizer to what's to come though. Look at the teams that get first round byes in this quadrant!

We have several good teams waiting to go today though, so that takes precedence. Like yesterday, I will simulate these as a best-of-three, but the "clinching" game will go down as the official result. Weather forecasts will be taken into account for the home team (the higher seed). All simulations are provided by WhatIfSports.com. Let's get going.

2014 NFL Tournament of Champions First Round: Larry Csonka Bracket

Hope you're having a wonderful Valentine's Day so far today. As my continued gift to you: a second batch of games for the NFL Tournament of Champions. The bye teams are pretty loaded in this bracket, but they get a week to prepare for the upcoming matchup.

Looking at teams, I almost named this bracket after Ray Lewis, since his two title teams with the Ravens were on here. Then after better thought, I felt the Dolphins of the early 70's deserved the namesake. That meant looking at Super Bowl MVP's, so I opted for Csonka. When you play for lone undefeated team (including playoffs) in Super Bowl history, you have to get some recognition, even if I think you're kind of a jerk for having a champagne celebration when the last undefeated team loses every year.

Neither of his squads plays today since they both were seeded in the top 16, but there are some compelling matchups anyway.  I think I'm more excited though for seeing my 3-seed Packers next week, and there's one more 70's Steelers squad on here.

The method of playing these games out will be like the one I did earlier this morning over in the Montana Bracket. All of these will be simulated best-of-three, with the "clinching" game being the official one. I will grab weather forecasts from each locale in an effort to make the game as realistic as possible for the sake of home field advantage. All simulations are provided by WhatIfSports.com. Let's go.

2014 NFL Tournament of Champions First Round: Joe Montana Bracket

Okay, maybe my graphics skills need work... or maybe I didn't want to spend money and thus used Paint... but still. You get the idea.

It's time for me to begin another batch of craziness, only this batch will take me significantly less time than the NBA Tournament of Champions took. The fact that I'm only using 48 teams instead of 64 helps, but so does me not needing to run a best-of-seven series every time. Football is much easier in this regard.

Even with only needing a week for each round, that's still 32 games I need to get through in the span of the next two weeks, which is how long it took to get through one round of the NBA Tournament of Champions. As such, I decided it was easiest to break the tournament up into brackets again. I'm only using four brackets this time, but it will still work great in this regard.

I decided to name each bracket after the superstar that appears most in each. With all the Niners champs from the 80's in here, Joe Montana was the easy name for this one. Yet, he doesn't have the top seed and in fact will be playing in two of the three matchups that I'll simulate today. The seeds you see here are the overall rankings that I pulled from Pro Football Reference, and initial details about the tournament can be found on the preview post.

As a reminder, I'm going to do these simulations as a best-of-three, with the "clinching" game being the official result, and I'll try to tabulate stats as best I can. I will also try to get accurate weather forecasts for the areas as best as I can for these. All simulations for the tournament are provided by WhatIfSports.com. Let's get started.

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.