I just want to watch some good football

September 21, 2011 3:56 PM

How can I easily find out which were the best (American) football games from the past weekend?

We subscribed to the NFL package that lets you watch any football game from this season after it's been broadcast. We did it because the games of our favorite team (Vikings) aren't usually broadcast in our market. It's shaping up to be a pretty awful year for them, so we're looking to get some use out of the service that isn't so depressing. I'm looking for preferably a column I can check each week to tell me which were the most exciting games over the weekend. Bonus points if I can easily avoid having the game's outcome spoiled.

posted by TungstenChef to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (7 answers total)

Advanced NFL Stats has almost exactly what you're looking for in their statistics called "Excitement Index" (EI) and "Comeback Factor" (CBF), both of which are purely empirical. You can read more about them here. There's no way to look them up after a game concludes without learning the score, but you could easily have a friend take a glance and tell you which games had the best EI and CBF.
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 4:00 PM on September 21, 2011 [4 favorites]

the outcome not spoiled is a hard one, but i really enjoy "inside the NFL" on showtime. i think it's probably the best nfl wrapup/preview show. sometimes i skip the interviews, but the four guys talking about the games and decisions and the players is great. i've gone back and watched games i missed because of their talking about it.

another show you should be watching (again, it'll spoil the endings) is SoundFX, i think it's on the NFL channel.
posted by nadawi at 4:01 PM on September 21, 2011

To play around with EI and CBF, you can also click here. That tool doesn't have this year's EI & CBF stats, but it lets you look at historical data. For instance, if you sort by CBF for 2010, you'll see that your Vikings staged an absolutely insane comeback against Arizona last November, clawing to an OT win after Brian Burke's model gave them a 1% chance of victory with just 6 minutes left in the fourth quarter and the Cardinals up by 14. That gave them a perfect CBF of 100 — the best you can have.
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 4:09 PM on September 21, 2011

You should probably watch the Raiders/Bills game from last weekend. Redskins/Cardinals was fun too.
posted by citron at 8:44 PM on September 21, 2011 [2 favorites]

Holy shit, last week had some awesome games.

Yeah, the Vikes lost horribly, but other than that there were several good games last week.

Any of the following were great;
OAK/BUF don't want to ruin the ending
ARI/WAS
CIN/DEN
DAL/SF went to a hilarious OT
PHI/ATL was a shootout for the ages

Seriously there were some really good games last week.

Bills bandwagon line forms to the rear.
posted by Sphinx at 9:20 PM on September 21, 2011

Peter King writes a column for Sports Illustrated online called Monday Mornibg Quarterback (MMQB) that recaps the highlights of the previous weekend. I think you are going to find it hard to not have spoilers though.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 10:03 PM on September 21, 2011 [1 favorite]

Hah, I guess that's another solution. Come to AskMe and post the same question week after week....
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 1:14 PM on September 22, 2011