According to my shaky calculations; If we consider everything even, our average win-% against this years schedule is 0.562… Or a 8,987 win season… This is an 100% useless stat, but I did the calculations per automatic and might as well save others from doing the same thing… :)

We lost 20 straight games to them from 1962-72 or thereabouts.

Plus I think we only beat them like 6 times from 1960-1980….so ya, we are slowly erasing that gigantic hole we dug ourselves early in our history.

The same goes for the Chiefs…we are still making up for the first twenty years of our history.

of course that includes 14 game seasons up to 1978.

I believe the average jumps significantly if we only look at post-1975. I know for a fact that the Broncos rank in the top 5 in all-time wins from 1975-present.

Who are the other 4 teams Zappa? My guess goes as followed:

1. Denver

2.Dallas

3. Pitt

4. Pats

5. Minnesota

I’m probably way off, but would love to know.

they started out 39-97-4. From 1960-69 they were 1-19 vs. KC and went from 1963-1972 without a win only a tie against Oakland. Were 5-15 against SD during that stretch also. To get to where they are now is amazing. Plus before Shanny Denver had only beaten Oakland 19 times, Shanny is 20-6 by himself.
Actually Denver is top 6 I think since the merger in 1970

This is based on research I did for a college project, and I’ve mentioned on here a bunch of times. I used 1978 as the beginning point, because the league adopted a 16 game season that year, so 9 wins means the same thing in 1981 as it does in 2007. I excluded 1982 and 1987 to maintain statistical consistency, because both of those years were shortened by labor stoppages.

Note that the Broncos lead the way in average wins. They are also the most consistent team by a measure called coefficient of variation, which normalizes standard deviations based upon the appliccable mean. The math is simply the standard deviation divided by the mean. Note that the Broncos almost always win, and the Cardinals almost always lose, and they’re two of the most consistent teams in the league.

I’m still a little fuzzy on coefficient of variation. I just dont understand it.

If you’re familiar with the empirical rule, it states that normally distributed data, that is data where the observed data points roughly approximate a bell curve, 66% of all observed data points will fall within an area plus or minus one standard deviation from the mean, 95% will be in an area plus or minus 2 standard deviations, and 99% will be in an area plus or minus 3 standard deviations. That sounds like math tech-speak, but it will make more sense with practical application in a minute, I hope.

If you look at the Broncos, they had a mean Wins outcome of 9.71 wins, with a standard deviation of 2.23 wins. For predictive purposes, that means that we would expect 66% of their future seasons to fall between 7.48 and 11.94 wins, and 95% of their future seasons to fall between 5.25 and 14.17 wins. The Cardinals, on the other hand, had a mean Wins outcome of 5.79 and a standard deviation of 1.68 Wins. That means that with 95% confidence, we can predict that Arizona’s Wins outcome for a future season will be between 2.43 and 9.15 Wins.

Now, the Broncos’ standard deviation of 2.23 wins is higher on a raw basis than Arizona’s standard deviation of 1.68 wins. Remember though, that standard deviation is relative to the mean, so to make it all reflect the same thing, you divide the standard deviation by the mean, and you get a number between 0 and 1. The lower the number (or coefficient of variation,) the lower percentage of the observed mean is demonstrably subject to variability. It’s just a normalized measure of consistency among a population of variables with different means.

Parsing the list a little, you notice that the Colts and Bucs are at the bottom. That’s a function of them being mostly terrible for the first 20 years of the sample, and mostly good for the next 10. San Francisco, however, was bad for the first 5 years, good for the next 15 or so, and then mostly bad for the 10 after that. The teams that show up as the most consistent are exactly who you’d expect.

The degree of consistency is mathematically independent of wins and losses, because the mean is factored into the CoV calculation. Intuitively, it seems a team is more likely to be consistent as a winner than a loser, because every team is theoretically motivated to try to win. Losing is not a desired outcome for any team, and it typically takes a really incompetent owner (Bob Irsay with the Colts, Hugh Culverhouse with the Bucs, the Bidwill family with the Cardinals) to consistently lose over a long period of time. It’s not coincidental that the fortunes of the Colts and Bucs changed almost immediately with Jim Irsay and Malcolm Glazer assuming ownership of the teams. The same Bidwill family continues to own the Cardinals, and you see the results.

Typically, there is movement around the mean between good and bad teams. A team will have a bad run, then a good one. The consistent winners are the ones with the best owners, in my opinion. The next biggest determinant is great Quartebacks, which in my mind, only falls below ownership as a factor because a QB doesn’t play 30 years.

Basically, I just injected intuition and flat-out opinion into a statistical discussion, but as an analyst, I guess that’s what I ultimately do everyday, is imagine the reasons behind the numbers.