Do Preseason Wins Correlate to Regular Season Success?

Written by Sam Ekstrom

Preseason record is usually dismissed; not just in football, but in every sport. The primary goal isn’t winning, but instead, player development and health – you think Packer fans wouldn’t surrender their 31-21 win over Oakland to get B.J. Raji back? He’s now out for the year with a torn bicep.

Nobody ever clinched a playoff berth or won a Super Bowl in a game played before the 1^st of September. Nonetheless, a small sample size indicates that preseason record is a decent indication of regular season record. Scoff if you want.

My research went like this:

 

—I picked one team from each division and tried to select a team that had put together some good and bad seasons over the past decade. The teams were the Minnesota Vikings (NFC North), New Orleans Saints (NFC South), Dallas Cowboys (NFC East), Seattle Seahawks (NFC West), New York Jets (AFC East), Jacksonville Jaguars (AFC South), Baltimore Ravens (AFC North) and Kansas City Chiefs (AFC West). Collectively, these teams have a .511 winning percentage over the past 10 years.

 

—Then I charted the number of preseason and regular season wins over the past 10 years for each team.

 

When all was said and done, there were 80 sets of numbers. Each result showed a preseason win total next to a regular season win total.

 

There were five winless records out of the 80 results. Unbelievably, four of the five belonged to the Kansas City Chiefs (2005, 2007, 2009, 2011 – beware of those odd-numbered years). The other team was the 2012 Jets. Of those five squads, only one finished the season with a winning record (’05 Chiefs).

 

The average regular season win total for the winless pentad was 6.2 wins, which translates to just shy of 10 losses. So far, this is about what you would expect, though the sample size is miniscule.

 

The other outlier was a 4-0 preseason; even rarer than the 0-4 group. Just four teams of the 80 went undefeated through the preseason (’09 Seahawks, ’12 Seahawks, ’13 Seahawks, ’09 Ravens). Obviously, last year’s Seahawks team was a Super Bowl-winning squad, which helps the bottom line for this exclusive club. Three of those four teams finished with winning records.

 

Using the Detroit Lions amongst the sample teams certainly would have changed the results of this group. The 0-16 Lions of 2008 went 4-0 in that preseason before losing the next 16 games.

 

Now to the meat of the data. Teams winning one, two or three games comprised 71 of the 80 spots.

 

The one-game winners numbered 14. The Vikings appear on the list three teams (2008, 2012 and 2013) and actually made the playoffs in two of those years. Eight of the 14 teams, however, had losing regular season records (57%).

 

The average regular season win total for this group was 6.9 – very close to the average of the winless teams.

 

Let’s look at the 3-win teams now. There were 27 of them, the second-biggest group. Eighteen of the 27 (67%) had a .500 or better mark in the regular season and eight notched double-digit wins, including the highly-successful 2009 Vikings (12 wins) and 2009 Saints (13 wins and Super Bowl victory). The worst team in the sample who notched three preseason wins? The 2012 Jaguars, who managed fewer regular season wins, with two, than they had preseason wins.

 

This group averaged 8.2 regular season wins.

 

So far, the line graph would be perfectly linear. Zero-win teams at 6.2 wins a year, 1-win teams at 6.9, 3-win teams at 8.2 and 4-win teams at 9.5. But the 2-win group is where things go haywire.

 

The 2-win group has 30 teams – 38 percent of the sample. Remarkably, 24 of the 30 teams (a whopping 80 percent!) won eight or more games, and 11 of 30 won 10 or more games. Four teams in this category tallied 13-win seasons, and only four had 10 or more losses.

 

The average regular season win total was 9.6 – nearly 10 regular season wins.

 

So how does one digest this outlier? Certainly over a bigger sample size, the percentage of .500-or-better teams would decrease. But does that nullify the validity of each other result? I don’t think it does. The remainder of the data seems awfully consistent that teams with winning preseason records go on to have winning regular seasons, and teams with losing preseasons go on to have losing regular seasons.

 

What the data does reveal is that it’s tough to be too drastically good or bad in the preseason. Nearly 40 percent of the 80 teams recorded went 2-2. This means that teams on either side of .500 are minorities. Perhaps an above-.500 preseason does show something about a team; that they have better depth or more motivated starters or elite coaching. On the other hand, maybe a below-.500 preseason team has mediocre quarterback play or under-achieving late-round draft picks or a coach who mails in it after the starters exit.

 

Because so many of the 2-2 teams had winning seasons, it shows this:

 

Good teams do not need to have excellent preseasons.

 

It seems, though, that a winning preseason is definitely a good omen and a losing preseason is definitely a bad one. For the Vikings, who, by the way, went 4-0 in the 1998 preseason, their current 3-0 record bodes well.