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Looking back: The most surprising games of the year

Five weeks ago, I looked at the most surprising results of the season. It’s time to update that post now that most of the season is in the books.

First, we need to rank the teams. The table below shows each team’s current Simple Rating System rating through week 15. As a reminder, the SRS is simply the sum of a team’s margin of victory and strength of schedule.

Eli does not like being surprised.

Half the time, Eli does not like being surprised.

Now that we have each team’s SRS score, it’s easy to come up with a projected game score. For example, since Miami has an SRS of -2.1 and Tennessee has an SRS of -8.7, this means the Dolphins are 6.5 points (rounding error) better than the Titans. Therefore, if Tennessee played at Miami, we would expect Miami to win by 9.5 points.

Well, Tennessee did travel to Miami, but the Titans won the game 37-3. Ouch. Instead of a 9.5-point win, the Dolphins suffered a 34-point loss. Therefore, this game was shocking to the tune of -43.5 points from the standpoint of the Dolphins. That makes it the most surprising game of the year.

Such a method is obviously going to be slanted towards blowouts. What if we wanted to just know which results were the most shocking? If you sort the table below by EXP_MOV — that’s the expected score — and type in “Loss” in the search box, you can see the biggest upsets.

According to the SRS, there were two huge upsets this year that only look more surprising in retrospect. The Patriots should have beaten the Cardinals by 19.4 points in Foxboro, but somehow lost in the final seconds. Meanwhile, the Saints at home against the Chiefs projected as an 18.4-point New Orleans win; it ended up being a Kansas City overtime victory.

You can also type in your favorite team name in the search box to see their most surprising results. For the Jets, the most surprisingly bad game was a 21-point home loss to Miami. On the positive side, the Jets defeated the Colts by 26 points. Eli Manning and the Giants had two games that were over 30 points away from expectations. Again San Francisco, New York shockingly won by 23 on the road, while in Atlanta, the Giants were shut out 34-0.

What results surprise you?

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