Let’s say there are three generic teams A, B, and C, and I ask you which team is better: A or B. And let’s say you rank them:

1. A
2. B

Great. 

Now let’s say I ask you to rank A, B, and C. The only three reasonable rankings are:

1. C
2. A
3. B

OR

1. A
2. C
3. B

OR

1. A
2. B
3. C

Why? Because you already told me that A was better than B head to head, so why would the addition of team C in the rankings switch the order of A and B. This condition is called Independence of Irrelevant Actors (I’ve written about violations of this in Olympic Sport Climbing). 

So how is this related to the NFL tiebreakers? Consider this case:

Going into week 18 this year (2023-24 season), if the Jaguars and Steelers both lost their week 18 games (The Steelers have already won, so this is moot) they would both be 9-8. So which of these two teams gets into the playoffs? The answer is that it depends on the result of the Broncos vs Raiders gamefeaturing two teams that are both eliminated from the playoffs! This meant that there was the possibility that the Broncos vs Raiders was a de facto playoff game…….for the Jaguars vs Steelers with the Broncos representing the Steelers and the Raiders representing the Jaguars! 

How is this possible? In two way ties, the NFL tie breaker is based on head to head results, and the Jaguars beat the Steelers on October 29 so the Jaguars are better than the Steelers head to head. And if the Raiders beat the Broncos, both those teams would finish 8-9 and the Jaguars and Steelers would be in a two way tie. If the Broncos won, that would put the Broncos at 8-9 and in a three way tie with the Steelers and Jaguars. In a three (or more) way tie, you apply the tie breakers and eliminate the bottom teams repeating the procedures starting at step 1 after each elimination. And in the three way tie, the Jaguars are eliminated first based on on strength of victory (all three teams would have been 6-6 in conference play). With the Jaguars eliminated, the Steelers best Denver based on head to head tie breakers. 

What this means is that we have the following rankings of teams with 8-9 records:

1. Jaguars
2. Steelers

AND

1. Steelers
2. Broncos
3. Jaguars

(This actually COULD make sense if the Broncos win affected some tie breaking metric with the Jaguars, but that is not what is happening here).

I don’t like this. What I’d like to see (and no one cares what I think, but I’ll tell you anyway) is a tie breaking metric that doesn’t change based on how many teams are tied; the ordering should be consistent whether it’s two teams or ten teams. So, without thinking very much about it, here are some tie breaking procedures that I think would be better:

• Go straight to conference record. All teams will have the same number of conference games and the number of wins here will give the same ranking when comparing head to head or 3+ way ties.
• Give ties to the team with more road wins. This would have worked better in the 16 game schedule as all teams played 8 games each at home and away. Now with a 17 game schedule, you would have to do winning percentage in road games, but this isn’t that big of a deal. Again, this would give the same ranking in head to head ties or 3+ way ties. And this is similar to one way that chess breaks ties: if two or more players are tied, the player with the better record as black in the winner. 
• You could just use strength of victory as a first step tie breaker. The only possible issue with this is that there could be situations where your strength of victory is affected by two teams already eliminated from the playoffs in such a way that you end up in the exact same situation that I describe here that I don’t like. So this wouldn’t be my first choice. 

My major point here is this: There shouldn’t be separate head to head tie breaking procedures and 3+ way tie breaking procedures. This can lead to very strange situations like the one I describe here. This would also greatly simplify understanding of tie breakers for fans. Right now, the tie breaking procedure can get really complicated. So what I’m advocating for is that the NFL pick a few metrics and use those as the tie breaking procedure for everything. I should be able to write the NFL tie breaking procedure by using arrange and just specifying an ordered list of variables (like the EPL (though EPL now has head-to-head tie breaks but further down the list of tie breakers). 

Cheers.