About Football Sensei
Sometimes it’s not obvious to me, as a Broncos fan, who I should be rooting for in a game that doesn’t involve my team or one of our division rivals. “Do I want the Dolphins or Steelers to win this one?” I made Football Sensei to calculate the effect of every game on my team’s playoff chances, and definitively answer the question “Who should I root for?”
Our Goal: Strategic Fandom
The NFL season is a complex web of interconnected outcomes. A game between two other teams can often have a significant, but not obvious, effect on your team's chances. Football Sensei uncovers these effects, providing clarity on who to root for in any given week to benefit your team.
What We Offer:
Playoff Aspirations
For teams in the hunt, we highlight which game outcomes will most improve their probability of making the postseason.
Draft Positioning
Fan of a bad team? No worries, Football Sensei provides advice for teams that are tanking too. You can see exactly who to root for to maximize your odds of getting a top draft pick next year.
Securing Top Seeding
If you’re pretty sure your team is making the playoffs, you’ll probably want to root for maximizing your odds of getting a playoff bye. Football Sensei does that too.
How to Use Football Sensei:
- Select Your Team: Navigate to your team's dedicated page from our homepage.
- View Game Impacts: Before an NFL game, check your team's page. Our "Who to Root For" table lists upcoming matchups and indicates which outcome in those games provides the biggest statistical advantage for your team's selected goal (e.g., increasing playoff odds).
Approach:
Football Sensei uses a combination of the Elo rating system to gauge team strength and Monte Carlo simulations (running hundreds of thousands of season scenarios) to calculate probabilities for playoffs, draft order, and conference championships. This allows us to quantify the impact of individual game results. You can learn more about the specifics on our Methodology page.