Excitement Index and Comeback Factor

Over the last couple of weeks, John has occasionally put up a FanShot with a Win Probability graph from Advanced NFL Stats. As cool as those charts are, Advanced NFL Stats has taken it to another level. Using the WP numbers already in place, they have created Excitment Index and Comeback Factor scores for every game since 2000. Maybe you should have a seat and take some deep breaths.This is just way too cool to take standing up.

The comeback index was easy. For any given game, the 'CBF' is based on the lowest win probability at any point for the ultimate winner. To make bigger comebacks have bigger CBFs, I made CBF be the inverse of the lowest WP.

For example, if a team is down by 10 with 10 minutes left in the 4th quarter, they'd have around a 0.13 WP. This means the trailing team has a 1 in 8 chance of winning, and the CBF is therefore 8. A team that comes back from a 0.01 WP, would have a CBF of 100, the largest possible.

That's a logical way to measure the magnitude of a comeback,  but how would one measure the excitement of an NFL game?

EI is simply the sum of the WP graph's movement throughout a game. That's it. Despite the simplicity, this method captures much of what makes a game interesting. Games with large swings in WP will end up with large EIs, while blow-out games where the WP quickly climbs to 0.95 for one team will have smaller EIs.

What are the top 5 most exciting Seahawks games since 2000? J.T. O'Sullivan is a jerk.