Browns Game Rewatchability Index

So we're all stuck at home with no live sports. In the grand scheme of things, it could be way worse, but let's face it...as sports fans, this kind of sucks. As Browns fans no less, it's even harder to participate in the kinds of game rewatch activities that fanbases with NFL teams that "win regularly" are talking up online because we have some VERY SLIM pickings when it comes to actual good moments to relive in the NFL Gamepass era (2009-2019).

Given this fact, and inspired by the work of other NFL fan-alysts (notably @ChiefsAnalytics, who does great work and who you should follow if you like football and numbers), I took a crack at ranking the best Browns games to dial up and watch while we're all cooped up in the house for the foreseeable future. Take a look at the list below and, if you're interested, I have posted a very short methodology below on how this list was derived. Happy viewing, "Go Browns!" and stay safe everyone!

By the way, if you haven't heard already, the NFL has offered their Gamepass product for free to fans while many of us are quarantined (through May 31st), so each of the games listed below should be available to anyone who can access that service on their internet connected devices!

The table above can also be accessed in google sheets at the following link: Rewatchable Browns Games

Methodology

This is going to be super short because the methodology used to find and rank these games is very (possibly overly) simple. First, I pulled in each Browns game from @NFLScrapR going back to 2009 and summed up the total Expected Points Added (EPA) for the Browns and each of their opponents. Subtracting total opponent EPA from the Browns' total EPA, I calculated a "watchability" score which generally tells us how much the Browns dominated a game (high positive watchability) or how much they were dominated in a game (low negative watchability). From there, I calculated the relative percentile of each watchability score, which is presented in the table above as the "Watchability Index". After removing games where the Browns were routed handily (there were many) and ranking high-to-low on the index, we arrive at the table above.

There are probably many ways to do this better, but I threw this list together in about two hours and I don't expect it to hold up to any subjective arguments around one game being better than another for some specific reason. The main goal here was to come up with one version of an objective list that might help us to pass the time without live sports while staying safe at home and allowing our medical professionals to care for people who really need their help.

Sources

Horowitz, Maksim, Ventura, Sam & Yurko, Ron (2016). NFLScrapr; Rstats package for accessing NFL play-by-play data, providing expected points and win probability estimate (Accessed April 11, 2020).