Blogging The Boys
The Dallas Cowboys will open training camp in about two weeks. Their first preseason game is in about four weeks, and the season opener is just eight weeks away. Among other things, that means win-total projections for 2026 are going to be coming in hot and fast. And some of them are already in:
Few things get football fans more riled up at this time of year than win-total projections for the coming season, and the reaction to those projections is completely predictable.
One part of the fan base is outraged that anybody could think the Cowboys could remain anywhere close to last year’s disappointing 7-9-1 team, another part is equally outraged that anybody could think the Cowboys could improve versus last year, a third part can’t understand how anybody could see much of a change in either direction.
But is getting worked up over those projections really worth it?
Almost two decades ago, Brian Burke, formerly of Advanced Football Analytics and now working for ESPN, published two articles three years apart titled ‘Pre-Season Predictions Are Worthless’ and ‘Pre-Season Predictions Are Still Worthless’. Today I’m going to use Burke’s methodology to understand whether anything has changed versus his assessments from 2007 and 2010, and I’m going to apply it to win projecti0ns covering the last four seasons.
To measure the accuracy of the projections at the time, Burke used a metric called mean absolute error (MAE). This is the average of the absolute difference between the projected wins and the actual win totals for a given year. If the MAE for a projection is 3.0, it would mean the projection was off by an average of 3.0 games in either direction. Obviously, the smaller the MAE, the better the prediction.
The win projections we’ll look at today are a collection of ‘expert’ projections for the last four years from ESPN (2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025) NFL.com (2022 , 2023, 2024, 2025), The Athletic (2022, 2023, 2024, 2025) as well as the Vegas win total projections (2022 and 2023, 2024, 2025).
For 2025, here’s how the experts ranked in terms of MAE for their projections.
The expert predictions look to be pretty evenly matched – I had to go to the second decimal to even find a difference – but for a sport that only has a 17-game season, being off by about two and a half wins sounds like a lot. But is it?
To...
