LOWFI: Week 1 Team Profiles

Sep 16, 2026

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. It then breaks down every team and shows how it came up with its rating. Those updates will be posted here each week, along with a companion post breaking down the full NFL.

Enjoy, engage, and ask questions!

-Jake

HOW TO READ A TEAM PROFILE

Every profle contains the same information

The header includes the record, the team’s overall rank by net rating, and how much the rating moved since last game. Under that, both models’ seasons projections: playoff odds, division odds and total wins, from LOWFI/1 in teal and LOWFI/0 inmagenta. Those two colours mean the same two models everywhere else in the profile.
Scoring is the season to date points for, points against and point differential, each shown a distance from the league average , with the team’s rank beside it. Raw scoring totals are in the subtitle.
Four ways to read this team is the same team through four lenses, all converted to a projected 17-game record so they share units.
- Record is the team’s current winning percentage, extended over 17 games.
- Pythagorean uses points scored and allowed instead of wins and losses using the Pythagorean win expectation model
- LOWFI/0 is the original model, carrying a full distribution over how good the team actually is rather than a single number.
- LOWFI/1 is a more sophisticated model: it uses points scored and allowed, adjusted for opponent, on a preseason prior built from the market with non-linear and interaction effecs.
All 10,000 seasons shows the distribution of win-totals from each model’s simulated universes. The wider the distribution, the more uncertain a model is about a team’s overall strength.
LOWFI/1 strength is the model’s rating itself: offense, defense and net, in expected points per game against an average opponent, each with a 90% band. Defense is shown as points *prevented*, so up is better on all three. The subtitle carries strength of schedule, in opponent net rating, split between games played and games remaining.
Where the rating comes from breaks each side of the rating into what the model used to estimate it. Bars run left to right in the order the model accumulates evidence - what it knew before the season, then what the season has told it - and each bar picks up where the last left off. Green helps the rating, orange hurts the rating, and the final bar is the final rating those pieces add up to.