Context and Overview

There are 32 teams in the NFL. While the number of games in the regular season has changed multiples times, during the years 2011-2020 - the scope of my work - there were 16 games. As uncreative as it sounds, the regular season is all games played before the postseason (the first set being the wild-card round).

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I wanted to examine how unbalanced the teams were in the prior decade. A quick Chi-Squared analysis showed that given the outcomes of each season, the teams had less than a 10^(-5) chance of being balanced. 

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Every year the NFL draft occurs. Every NFL team picks a new player (usually a D1 football college senior) in reverse order of last season's win percentage rankings. For example, the worst team picks first, and the winner of the super bowl picks last. (Although draft order usually changes through trading, I did not explore this in the project.)

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I wanted to see if the draft benefitted the worse teams (bottom 16 from the previous season). I conclude that it does; while there is no average win percentage rank change across all teams, the bottom 16 teams improve their ranking by five.

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Finally, I examined whether general manager tenure effects win percentages. That is, do the teams with longer-tenured GMs have higher win percentages? The answer is no.