Blogging The Boys
Every summer, NFL fans ask the same question: How good will my team be this year? The answers usually fall into one of two camps. One side points to free agency, the draft, and coaching changes. The other points to last year’s record.
Neither tells the whole story.
Long before analytics became mainstream, baseball writer Bill James proposed six indicators that tended to predict whether teams would improve or decline from one season to the next. The indicators were designed for baseball, not football, but the underlying ideas apply remarkably well to the NFL.
Some of these indicators are stronger than others. None should be treated as definitive. The NFL is an unusually noisy sport. Teams play only 17 games. Injuries swing seasons. One tipped interception can change a division race. That means even the best statistical indicators should be viewed as tendencies rather than predictions.
Our goal today isn’t to predict the 2026 standings. It’s to identify the forces quietly pushing teams toward improvement, or regression, before the season begins.
Let’s see what they say about the 2026 NFC East.
One of the strongest predictors of future performance isn’t a team’s record, it’s its point differential.
Wins matter, of course. But not all wins are equally convincing. A team that consistently outscored opponents by two touchdowns is usually more sustainable than a team that survived a string of one-score games.
That’s why analysts often start with point differential rather than the standings.
The Pythagorean Formula estimates how many games a team should have won based solely on points scored and points allowed. If a team wins significantly more games than expected, history suggests some regression is likely. If it wins fewer games than expected, improvement often follows.
Here’s how the NFC East stacks up entering 2026:
body .sbnu-legacy-content-table td, body .sbnu-legacy-content-table th, body .sbnu-legacy-content-table { border: 1px solid #000 !important; border-collapse: collapse !important; } body .sbnu-legacy-content-table td, body .sbnu-legacy-content-table th { padding: 2px 6px !important; } Pythagorean Win ProjectionsTeam2025 W/LPoints scoredPoints allowedProjected winsVariance****Trend for 2026Eagles11-637932510.0+1.0Cowboys7-9-14715117.7-0.2Commanders5-123564516.2-1.2Giants4-133914397.1-3.1The biggest takeaway isn’t that the formula predicts exact records. It doesn’t. Rather, it identifies teams whose record may have overstated or understated their true level of play.
The Eagles outperformed their expected wins; the Cowboys were about as expected. The Commanders and Giants finished with fewer wins than their point differential deserved, and are likely to improve, even without major roster changes.
This is one of the most reliable indicators we have, because point differential tends to be much more stable from year to year than win-loss record.
One-score games have an outsized impact on NFL standings. The difference between a 12-win season and a 9-win season is often just a handful of plays spread across four or five close games. While elite teams may consistently put themselves in position to win late, the outcome of those games is surprisingly volatile from year...
