Ben Cohen wrote a piece I saw on Yahoo asking: "Started 0-1?: Your Season is Basically Over." The article goes on to point out that only 8 champions have lost their first game of the season, and only 3 of the last 10 champions have been able to overcome a loss in the opening week.
The author egregiously ignores simple statistics to generate an article that will capitalize on the public's history of overreacting to the results at the beginning of the season (hoping to get more traffic to his article).
Since the NFL has expanded to a 16 game schedule the combined regular season record of NFL champions is 380-100 or .791. The record of future champions in the opening week is 38-8-1, or .819 (38.5wins/47games going back slightly longer to the beginning of the super bowl era, not the 16 game format). It should be expected that those teams won at nearly the same rate, they are (mostly) the exact same teams. Future champions are going to win the opening game around 80% of their opening games, just like they are going to win 80% of their games in total.
To the fans of the teams that lost in the first week, keep your head up, it happens to 1 in 5 champions (the same should be true if you pick any week in the season...except the playoffs, no champion lost in the playoffs).
The "prediction:" The NFL champion of this season will win between 10 and 15 games in the regular season.
I am wrong if: There is a perfect season, or a good team struggles to 9-7 only to have key players return to full health for the playoffs. Those are both very unlikely.
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