How the numbers on this site are actually built, in plain words.
We run our own simulation of the 2026 season, thousands of times over, and read off how often each team wins its division, its conference, or the Super Bowl, and how often it makes the playoffs at all. Next to that, we show whatever price the market is actually offering on the same team and market. The gap between the two is the whole product: our number, the market's number, side by side.
Four things feed every price on this page: our own season simulation, 20,000+ runs; live market data from bookmakers and exchanges; a qualitative read of public expert previews, capped so it can only nudge a price, never drive it; and whatever you change yourself with the scenario tool below.
Each simulated season plays out the whole league at once, so a division race, a conference seed and a Super Bowl trophy all come from the SAME imagined season, not three separate guesses stapled together. Run that a few thousand times and every market becomes a simple count: out of every simulated season, in how many of them did this team win the division? That share, not a single point estimate, is the price.
Before it reaches the board, our raw number is pulled ("shrunk") toward whatever the market is actually pricing. Early in a season, our own uncertainty is wide, so a big gap between our number and the market usually means our model has not converged yet, not that we have spotted something the market missed. Read a gap as information, not a claim.
A row only ever gets a Back badge when a real bookmaker price exists for it. If no book quotes the market, the best we can show is a Watch, tagged "exchange" when the only price available trades on a prediction market rather than a bookmaker. We never invent a price to fill a gap.
The gap shown on every row is our number minus the market's, in percentage points. A gap being large is not the same as a gap being trustworthy -- treat it as a flag to look closer, not as an instruction.
Odds are always fetched, never invented. A feed we could not reach keeps its last captured price and says so here rather than quietly ageing on the board.
Every team page starts with our six prices for that team. Below that, two controls let you build your own version of the season: drag the win total up or down, or force a win or a loss on two or three of that team's own upcoming games, ranked by how much each one actually moves the team's playoff price.
Neither control changes a formula by hand. Both work by looking back through our own simulated seasons and keeping only the ones consistent with what you just asked for, then reading every price off that smaller, matching set. Drag a team to 13 wins, and every price on the page reprices off the simulated seasons where that team actually won about 13 games, not a straight-line guess. Force a marquee game, and every price reprices off the simulated seasons where that specific result actually happened. Force a combination unusual enough that very few simulated seasons match it, and the page says so plainly rather than showing a number resting on almost nothing.
Reset undoes everything in one tap. The page's own URL remembers your scenario, so sharing the link hands someone else exactly what you built, not just the team.
