Why NFL Schedule Predictions Are Always Wrong

It's hard to avoid predicting the Seahawks schedule, but here's why you shouldn't over-think it

The NFL schedule release prompts countless predictions, but there are too many variables at play to even expect to know how Week 1 will play out, let alone 17 games. History is littered with examples of predictions blowing up in the face of those who claim to know what will happen:

“The atomic bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives.” - Admiral William Leahy to president Truman regarding the Manhattan Project.

If you’ve ever been on Reddit or Twitter, then you know we are living in a time of a record number of experts on every topic you can imagine.

The Seahawks went 14-3 against a schedule that had Vegas setting an over/under of 8.5 wins when the dates were announced in May.

Over the next four months, many predictions will be made about Seattle’s schedule, counting wins and losses based on factors that are bound to change countless times over and could know possibly be known in May. As I wrote on Friday, the NFL’s decision to back-load Seahawks-Rams for the end of the season could backfire if either team falls out of the playoff race.

Philip Rivers started games for the Colts last season! During a playoff push!

Did anyone predict that?!

Reasons predictions fail

Injuries

It’s not just Rivers. Other quarterbacks who started games in 2025 include:

• Clayton Tune, Trey Lance, Riley Leonard, Tanner McKee, and Gardner Minshew with one each

• Chris Oladokun, Max Brosmer, Tyler Huntley, Josh Johnson, and Cooper Rush with two each

• Rivers, Quinn Ewers, Davis Mills, and Jake Browning with three each

• Tyrod Taylor and Brady Cook with four each (both for the Jets)

• Carson Wentz started five games; Dillon Gabriel started six games; Shedeur Sanders started seven games

• Marcus Mariota and Mac Jones both started eight games

• Tyler Shough started nine games

• Joe Flacco started 10 games! (for two different teams)

• And Jacoby Brissett started 12 games!

How can anyone predict what the outcome of certain games will be when we don’t even know who the quarterback of the offense will be yet? Quarterbacks nowhere near your radar will probably throw passes against the Seahawks next season, not to mention that Sam Darnold has to survive an 18-week schedule too.

It’s been a couple of years since Seattle had a quarterback injury but they had to go to their reserves in 2021 and 2023.

Of course, that’s only one of the positions and the quality of opponents will vary significantly based on their respective injury reports and when the Seahawks play them during the season.

Luck

Brian Burke said this about fumble recovery luck:

However, fumble recoveries are random and depend on where players happen to be when the ball comes loose, who sees it first, and how an irregularly shaped ball bounces. Put simply, fumble recovery is chaotic and therefore not indicative of a team's future ability to produce or recover fumbles.

And in another post wrote this:

Fumble recovery is extremely random. It's literally a 50/50 proposition of who will recover once the ball comes out, and there is absolutely no consistency at the team level of being able to recover fumbles more or less often than other teams.

A team can prepare in such a way to reduce their own fumbles perhaps, but can’t be coached to recover fumbles, either by themselves or the other team. Seahawks fans have witnessed many hundreds of plays that felt like “ugh, why not us!” whether it be a fumble or a random bounce of the ball on a deflected pass, etc.

Even just last season in the NFC Championship game, we saw two outcomes of the same play:

• Rams PR Xavier Smith muffed a punt and recovered it

• Smith then muffed a punt and Dareke Young recovered it

That second muffed punt changed the course of the game and could be the most significant reason that Seattle was able to beat L.A. that day. Conversely, the 49ers potentially lose to the Seahawks in Week 1 if Darnold or another Seahawk recovers Darnold’s fumble in the red zone.

ESPN even had to change their formula for QBR because they had no way of proving that fumble recoveries were a skill.

“Given that we don't debit a fumbler fully for fumbling, we now don't reward a player entirely for recovering a fumble. Sometimes another player also could have recovered the fumble easily.”

That’s only one example of luck impacting the outcome of games. The Seahawks had seven games last season that were decided by four points or fewer, telling you just how important one bad bounce or good bounce can be towards an outcome.

What’s your way-too-early Seahawks prediction:

Coaching changes

Although midseason head coach firings are rare and not as likely to occur on a given team’s schedule, they do still happen and could dramatically alter the make-up of an opponent and how you would prepare them. More often, teams will fire coordinators during the season and that potentially changes preparation even more because it means altering the scheme.

The most dangerous team to Seattle’s Super Bowl chances, the Rams, fired their special teams coordinator during the 2025 season. That’s not as impactful as changing a head coach or offensive, defensive coordinator, but goes to show that even the good teams on your schedule will morph during the season in ways you can’t predict.

For the past month, many have speculated whether or not the Seahawks’ Week 1 opponent — the Patriots — will have a different head coach next season based on reasons that NOBODY would have predicted.

Beyond that, I wouldn’t say any of Seattle’s opponent head coaches begin the season on the hot seat, with the exception of Dan Quinn and the Seahawks face Washington in Week 3 so that’s not likely to change.

The names and faces of the coaches could be the same in December, but their motivations are bound to be different for some of them.

Motivational reasons

Strength of schedule is so important and it plays a huge part in deciding the playoff picture. We could look at the Panthers last season and note how Carolina was a far hungrier team in Week 17 than most predicted they would be in Week 1, meaning that although the Seahawks won that game by 17 points it was a game with much bigger NFC playoff consequences than imagined.

A 2013 study by Football Perspective showed that preseason strength of schedule projections showed “no meaningful relationship” with a team’s actual strength of schedule after the games were played:

“In English, that means we would project the Broncos (pre-season SOS of 0.430) to have an actual SOS of 0.482, while the Panthers (pre-season SOS of 0.543) to have an SOS of 0.511 by the end of 2013. Another way of thinking of that is that all strengths of schedule regress to the mean (of 0.500), with only 26% of a team’s actual SOS being dictated by their projected strength of schedule. However, the R^2 is just 0.06, indicating no meaningful relationship.”

Which is to say that in order to calculate a team’s actual strength of schedule, you need to do astronomical levels of math because now you must account for all variables for the schedule that all 32 teams play.

Whereas one team will be underestimated, another “automatic loss” could become an automatic win. For example:

The Seahawks play the Rams in Week 18. The game of the year?! Not if one of those teams has secured an exact playoff seed — or is already mathematically eliminated — and sits their starters.

Not only can we not predict injuries, coaching changes, or luck, but we also can’t presume to know when a team will throw in the towel (the defending champion Rams shut down their starters by November in 2022) or be in a surprising playoff hunt and laying everything on the line.

The Seahawks play the Panthers in Week 17 again this year. We have no real idea what that Panthers team will look like or what their record will be by then.

A new approach to predictions

Instead of counting wins and losses in May, try these approaches to analyzing the schedule instead: