Where these numbers come from

Preseason is not read at all. This site carries the regular season and the postseason and nothing else. Four August games decide nothing, and a record that counted them would not be the club's record.

One number decides a great deal of this site, so it is written down rather than left in the code. There is only one, because everything else here is arithmetic on records rather than a model.

Efficiency margin is a club's rating in points per game: how much better than an average club its offense and defense are, added together, adjusted for the opponents faced. A rating of +5.6 means about five and a half points a game better than average. The number is The Gridiron King's and this site consumes it rather than recomputing it. Everything below is arithmetic on that number and can be reproduced by hand from what the pages show.

Schedule strength is the mean efficiency margin of a club's opponents. A club whose schedule includes an opponent with no rating is averaged over the rated ones only, and its team page says how many that is.

The ratings differential on a preview is one club's rating minus the other's, plus 1.7 for the home side. That is the whole calculation. It is not a projection, a value, an edge or a lean, and nothing here compares it with the betting line to say one is better than the other.

The default pick in Predict mode is the club with the higher rating, plus home field. Where a betting line exists the line is used instead, because a market that has taken money knows more than a rating from last season.

Seeding is not a model. No rating orders a playoff seed on this site, because no rating orders one in this league: the seeds are won-lost-tied percentage with the published tiebreakers behind it. There is no committee, no poll and no vote to approximate. Where a tie runs past the steps a pick sheet can produce, the page names the step it stopped at.

Division and conference records are two different numbers over two different sets of games, and the tiebreakers use both: division record is step two and conference record is step four. The standings print them in separate columns for that reason.

Against-the-spread records are accumulated, not reconstructed: each line is stored while a game is upcoming, frozen at kickoff, and graded afterwards. Every rate is printed with the number of games behind it.

It does not publish a projection dressed as a pick, and it does not compare its own numbers with the betting line to tell you one is better. It does not invent a value it does not have: a game with no line says so, a player with no statistics has no page, and a seeding is withheld until games have been played. Where a number could be derived two ways it is derived once, and where two sources disagree the page says which one it is reading.

It does not run the league's full tiebreaking procedure. Four of its steps follow from a pick sheet and the rest need points scored, points allowed or a coin; every page that shows an order says which of those it used.

The stamp in the footer of most pages is when that page was built. A player page is stamped when his numbers were last read, which is the only date that means anything there. The live board carries its own clock and says when it last asked.