Not everything I write in this space will be terribly complex, requiring massive spreadsheets and obscure mathematical concepts. How about something simple today? I’m going to compare the Overwatch League’s records, and especially its playoff records, to something most of us are more familiar with: the NFL.

The NFL season is 16 games long. The Overwatch League season is 40 games long, or 2.5 times as long. What would OWL teams’ records look like if they were in the NFL? We can simply divide OWL teams’ actual W-L records by 2.5, rounding to the nearest whole number, to see what they’d look like. This might be interesting, in that it will let us see how wins and losses were distributed in the fashion of a league that we have a little more experience analyzing.

Atlantic Division

New York Excelsior      14-2
Boston Uprising         10-6
London Spitfire         10-6
Philadelphia Fusion     10-6
Houston Outlaws         9-7
Florida Mayhem          3-13

Pacific Division

Los Angeles Valiant     11-5
Los Angeles Gladiators  10-6
Seoul Dynasty           9-7
San Francisco Shock     7-9
Dallas Fuel             5-11
Shanghai Dragons        0-16

This gives us a total record of 98-94, which is obviously a little skewed. New York, London, and Philadelphia all gain the most from rounding, while Boston is the biggest loser. I’ll adjust the totals then, to get:

Atlantic Division

New York Excelsior      13-3
Boston Uprising         11-5
London Spitfire         9-7
Philadelphia Fusion     9-7
Houston Outlaws         9-7
Florida Mayhem          3-13

Pacific Division

Los Angeles Valiant     11-5
Los Angeles Gladiators  10-6
Seoul Dynasty           9-7
San Francisco Shock     7-9
Dallas Fuel             5-11
Shanghai Dragons        0-16

And I’ll assume that tiebreakers would still put those teams in the order they actually were. This gives us a perfect 96-96 overall league record, and if this were a conference in the NFL, the following playoff matchups:

Philadelphia (9-7) at Boston (11-5)

London (9-7) at L.A. Gladiators (10-6)

Byes: New York (13-3), L.A. Valiant (11-5)

This NFL simulation, with four teams at 9-7, seems to back up the notion that the OWL standings were pretty bunched up around the middle-to-slightly-above-average tier. It was New York, then seven teams between 22 and 27 wins, and then the rest. If the league does expand to 18 teams, as has been rumored, I expect we’ll see a greater distribution of wins and losses.

Consider the future

But what teams will have what records next season? That’s an interesting question, and not just for the obvious “Well, we don’t know, because it hasn’t happened yet” reasons. Consider two NFL teams that had seasons like this:

Team A: 6-2 in the first half, 4-4 in the second half

Team B: 2-6 in the first half, 4-4 in the second half

Maybe you think Team A fell apart a bit and Team B improved significantly. Admittedly, the differences in records aren’t great, so it would also be reasonable to think the two teams didn’t really change that much, and that their differing records are the result of mostly random factors.

Team A is the NFL-record equivalent of the London Spitfire. Team B is the San Francisco Shock. Their records don’t exactly match up with what I posted above, because I’m using their half-season standings (15-5/9-11 for LDN and 6-14/11-9 for SFS), dividing those by 2.5 and then rounding.

Yet clearly, anyone who watched OWL would say that London declined in the second half and San Francisco improved. If you were to pick which team you think might be better next year, you’d probably be inclined to pick the Shock. And you might be right, because of how the Shock overhauled its roster, while the Spitfire stayed with mostly the same lineup. Or maybe it was a little bit of luck, fatigue, or other factors. Maybe it was both.

But that brings up another thing about the OWL that we don’t really know yet: how teams will change from year to year. We don’t know which players will come and go and, more importantly, what heroes will be in the mix and what the meta will look like. Just ask Dallas what a change in the meta can mean.

Another thing that makes esports very different from other sports like football is the relatively short time a player will spend in the top tier of his profession. In the NFL, you’d expect a good 23-year-old player to still play well at 24, 25, and 26. The aging curve is less forgiving in esports, so it’s possible that a team with multiple players in their early 20s could decline rapidly, even if they were good the previous year.

Now, I don’t think that means New York will win only 10 games next year, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see, well, some surprises in the standings. Will it be more or less than what we typically see in a league like the NFL? It will probably take a few years to figure all that out.