LOWFI is a constrained NFL projection system designed to rate and forecast the NFL season. It comes in two flavors - the original model (dubbed LOWFI/0) and its evolution into a more advanced (but still constrained) system (dubbed LOWFI/1).
Every week, LOWFI runs on Tuesday morning to make its best assessment of every team in the NFL and then it simulates the remainder of the season 10,000 times to assess where things are headed. Those updates will be posted here each week, along with a companion post breaking down each team’s LOWFI assessment.
Enjoy, engage, and ask questions!
-Jake
THE RATINGS
LOWFI/1 rates every team’s offense and defense, and it expresses its assessment of team quality in expected points per game against an average team. The net rating is these two ratings together and can be thought of as how many points this team would be expected to win or lose by against a league-average opponent on a neutral field.
The ratings above are point estimates, but a key aspect of the LOWFI system is that it understands that the NFL is full of uncertainty, and it explicitly models it. This can be thought of as what LOWFI doesn’t know about the team - the uncertainty left in the estimate after this many games - and not a suggestion of how much a team will vary week to week.
OFFENSE AND DEFENSE
Up and to the right is good. Defense is plotted as points prevented, so both axes run the same direction.
THE SEASON PROJECTIONS
The tables below show each LOWFI model’s results across 10,000 simulations of the remaining schedule. In each simulation, a team’s rating is drawn from its estimated distribution and held as “true” for that universe. Then the results are counted to determine the probability of various outcomes.
LOWFI/0 works the same way, but it draws a single “true strength” number for the simulation, and the table shows where it agrees and disagrees with LOWFI/1’s more sophisticated model.
Similar to the ratings, the projections table above are point-estimates, but LOWFI simulates 10,000 seasons - below is the distribution of wins per team across everyone of those simulations, according to LOWFI/1
The LOWFI system shares the same foundational concepts and model, but LOWFI/0 and LOWFI/1 are distinct models with distinct opinions - the chart below shows how the models differ in their current projection for each team’s win total.
THIS WEEK
Looking ahead, you can find every game’s distribution of possible outcomes, according to LOWFI/1.
And the distributions, in summary form, and comparing how LOWFI sees the game compared to the Tuesday line.
Reading this table:
LINE is LOWFI/1’s projected margin next to the market’s, both from the home team’s perspective.
EDGE is the difference between LOWFI/1’s implied line and the market line.
WIN PROBABILITY runs all three opinions side by side, LOWFI/1, LOWFI/0, and the market de-vigged implied probability.
HOME COVER and PUSH are LOWFI/1’s opinion against the posted spread
STAKE is a quarter Kelly strategy expressed in units per hundred, and reads zero wherever LOWFI/1 doesn’t want to make a bet.
LOWFI/0 and LOWFI/1 not only disagree on the full season, but often on the upcoming week.
EVERY WEEK IS IMPORTANT
The NFL discourse normally begins discussing how important individual games are when division races and playoff seeding takes shape, but every game has the potential to shift a season. This can be expressed through the concept of playoff leverage, and LOWFI/1 uses its 10,000 simulated seasons to produce its own calculation of the importance of a single game on the likely playoff picture.
The solid bar is percentage of simulations in which a team makes the playoffs following a loss this week, the muted bar is the same but following a win, and the gap between them is the leverage itself.
WHAT LOWFI DOESN’T SEE
No play-by-play, no personnel, no injury report. LOWFI reads box scores, so it learns a quarterback is hurt only once the team starts scoring like a team whose quarterback is hurt - in backtesting the 2025 Colts stayed “good” for weeks after Daniel Jones went down. Week 18 is its worst week of the season by a wide margin, for the same reason: the market knows who’s resting and LOWFI doesn’t.