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The Lab · 2026 season, results through Week 5

Sunday Rooting Guide

Pick your team and what you want for it. The guide plays out the rest of the season thousands of times and ranks the games by how much each result moves your odds, so you know who to cheer for on Sunday.

Pick any of the 32 teams. The link updates, so you can share it.

Make the playoffs67%Win the division49%Get the No. 1 seed9%
Week 54All remaining games55

Buffalo Bills

3-1 · No. 3 seed, division leader · AFC East

Playoffs odds up 1 pt since the end of Week 4 (66% to 67%).

Make the playoffs

67%

Week 5: who to root for

Ranked by how far the Bills’ chance to make the playoffs moves between the best and worst result. Changes are in percentage points.

10 other games in Week 5 move your odds by less than a point, or by less than the guide can tell apart from chance, so they are left off.

Results that already moved your odds

For each recent final, how much better or worse off the Bills are for the way it ended, compared with the other team winning. Same goal as above: make the playoffs.

  • NE 29, BUF 26Week 4Hurt −22 pts
  • NYJ 12, CHI 23Week 4Helped +3 pts
  • MIA 10, MIN 15Week 4Helped +2 pts
  • DEN 14, SF 24Week 4Helped +2 pts
  • IND 30, WAS 13Week 4Hurt −1 pt
  • TEN 18, BAL 24Week 4Hurt −1 pt
  • JAX 22, CIN 17Week 4Helped +1 pt

How the Sunday Rooting Guide works

For every game still to play, the guide asks one question: how much does the result change your team’s chance to make the playoffs? It plays the rest of the 2026 season 60,000 times, with the same Elo ratings and the same NFL tiebreakers as the Playoff Machine. In each simulated season it records who made the playoffs, who won each division and who took the No. 1 seed. A game’s effect is the difference between your team’s chance in the seasons where one side won and in the seasons where the other did.

Reading the numbers

Every change is in percentage points of your team’s chance, not percent growth: going from 40% to 48% is +8 points. Games are ranked by the gap between the best and the worst result, and a game is only ranked when that gap is at least a point and clearly bigger than the simulation’s own margin of error. The three goals are worked out separately, because a result that helps a wild-card chase can hurt a division race. When the standings already prove a goal is won or out of reach, the guide says so instead of showing odds. The same simulated seasons are used for every comparison, so the rankings do not shift from one reload to the next.

What it does not know

This is a model, not a forecast. The ratings come only from this season’s final scores, so early in the year they are rough. They know nothing about injuries, quarterbacks, rest or the spread, and ties are not part of the main simulation (a tie is worked out separately for the biggest games, from a smaller sample). Cross-conference games matter only through tiebreakers such as strength of victory. The numbers are rebuilt when final scores reach our data, which can take a few hours after a game ends, and a game that has just finished is taken off the list in the meantime. Last rebuilt Oct 10.

Build your own scenario in the Playoff Machine · Bills vs. Rams, position group by position group · How the Bills stack up

Schedule and scores: the nflverse nfldata games file, CC BY 4.0. Odds and tiebreakers calculated by Raiders Rundown.

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