Kansas City Chiefs Do Something Right

Added on Oct 05, 2010 by Jason Kearney in

NFL

Yesterday my SportsBetting World colleague Jack Thurman talked about the excellent sports coverage in the Wall Street Journal, and he’s not kidding. The WSJ presents another interesting statistical analysis in today’s edition concerning the lack of undefeated teams in the 2010 NFL season. As of today, there’s only one remaining undefeated team in the NFL–the Kansas City Chiefs. It’s the earliest in the season that the number of undefeated teams have been pared down to one since 2001.

This is actually the first time in nine years that the number of undefeated teams has been pared to one this early in the season. In league history, it takes, on average, 6.3 weeks in the season for there to be only one undefeated team left. It took 15 weeks to reach this point last season and, since the 1970 merger, there have only been six other times where there was only one undefeated team this early.

That Kansas City is the lone perfect team this early can partly be chalked up to parity, and partly to luck. The New York Jets are a one-point loss against the Baltimore Ravens away from being unblemished—they’ve won their other three games by an average of 15 points—and the Chiefs were a field goal away from losing to the lowly Cleveland Browns in Week 2 (not to mention the Chiefs just had a bye week so they’ve only played three games).

The question is, how long can the Chiefs stay undefeated? The final perfect team in the past decade has stayed that way for an average of 11.4 weeks. Clearly this statistic doesn’t impress the oddsmakers, who have the Chiefs as eight-point underdogs when they visit the Indianapolis Colts on Sunday.

For those of you scoring at home, the WSJ offers this chart of the past twelve seasons indicating the first week after which there was only one undefeated team and the team name:

2010: 4 (Chiefs)
2009: 15 (Colts)
2008: 6 (Titans)
2007: 9 (Patriots)
2006: 9 (Colts)
2005: 5 (Colts)
2004: 8 (Eagles)
2003: 8 (Chiefs)
2002: 5 (Raiders)
2001: 4 (Rams)
2000: 8 (Vikings)
1999: 5 (Rams)

As the quoted blurb from the WSJ notes, this weekend may very well see the end of the Chiefs undefeated run as they play on the road against the Indianapolis Colts. Should they upset the Colts, however, they’ve got an easier road ahead with games at Houston, Oakland and Denver and home games against Jacksonville, Buffalo and Arizona.