By Eric Eager and George Chahrouri
The NFL playoffs are a great experience, combining the single-elimination aspect of March Madness with a condensed number of berths to help ensure later rounds aren’t diluted by bad teams that get hot. Every team has a path to Miami and the Lombardi Trophy.
We’re going to prepare for the month-long journey in a couple of ways: a little hard math to anchor us in reason, and a little bit of data-driven opinion on the key or the downfall for each team. We’ve simulated the NFL playoffs 20,000 times, leveraging machine learning (powered by AWS) to give the percent chances of each team standing on the podium on Feb.