NFL Results Explorer

Any Given Sunday.

Before I was a big football fan, I knew those 3 words in the context of the 1999 film of the same name, starring Al Pacino and Cameron Diaz. Now, I know it as the phrase that best describes the parity and unpredictability of the NFL.

I wanted to build a visualization to help easily explore some of these unpredictable results over the years. With that, I'm excited to present the NFL Results Explorer!

This tool lets you explore the results of every NFL game since 1999. For each game, you can easily see both the spread (the expected point differential) and the actual point differential. You can also filter and sort the data in interesting ways, and hover over each game to learn more.

How to Interpret the Visualization

Each game is visualized with a diverging bar chart. Both the spread and actual differential are 0 at the center for each game, and the bars go left or right depending on those values.

Here's week 7 of the 2023 season:

Observing the spread and actual differential gives us some interesting insights.

There were seven teams that won in upsets: JAX, NE, NYG, ATL, LV, PIT, and SF. These are games where the spread and actual differential went in opposite directions from the center.

There were five teams that won and covered the spread: BAL, SEA, DEN, KC, and PHI. These are games where the spread and actual differential went in same direction from the center, and the actual differential was larger than the spread. The overlap of the actual differential and the spread is in this color.

There was one team that won but didn't cover the spread: CLE. These are games where the spread and actual differential went in the same direction from the center, but the spread was larger than the actual differential.

An easy way to tell if a game covered the spread is whether you can see any of the spread color in the bar. We can see that, in this week, 4 winners covered the spread and 8 did not.