Just Ask the Mayans
"When in doubt, predict that the present trend will continue."
- Murphy's Laws
It's now an annual tradition here to calculate year-end NFL power rankings using tools we developed as Friday Fragments. So I grabbed 2012 NFL regular season records and ran them through our tournament matrix calculator. Of the resulting top 12 teams (by power ranking), 10 are in the playoffs:
| Rank | Team | Power |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Falcons | 91 |
| 2 | Texans | 79 |
| 3 | Broncos | 77 |
| 4 | Colts | 76 |
| 5 | Ravens | 76 |
| 6 | 49ers | 76 |
| 7 | Packers | 72 |
| 8 | Patriots | 67 |
| 9 | Bears | 65 |
| 10 | Seahawks | 59 |
| 11 | Bengals | 59 |
| 12 | Rams | 55 |
The Vikings and Redskins replace the Bears and Rams in real life.
These rankings look at the season as a whole, which is why my Falcons come out strongly on top. But it's a valid argument to weigh recent games more heavily; for example, if you remove the first 5 weeks, you wipe out the Broncos' 3 losses, and they come in first. Feel free to visit the page and run your own partial season calculations.
Of course, "past performance does not guarantee future results," so that's why they play 'em. But one thing seems sure: it's been an exciting regular season, and the postseason promises to be just as good.