The NFL section has two working pages and a page for every week. The schedule lists each regular-season game with its kickoff and stadium; the simulator starts from the real standings and lets you decide the games that are left. This guide covers what each page shows, how the playoff field is decided and where the simulator's limits are.
Reading a week of the schedule
A season is 272 games: 32 teams, 17 games each, spread over 18 weeks so that every team has exactly one bye. Six of a team's games are against its three division rivals; the other eleven come from a rotating formula that pairs it with one division of its own conference, one division of the other conference and a few teams that finished in the same place last year. Schedules differ from team to team, so two clubs with the same record may not have faced the same opposition.
The NFL schedule opens on the next week to be played, marked Next up, with a strip of numbers from 1 to 18 for jumping to any other week. Each week is its own page, such as Week 12, so a link always opens the same set of games. Games are grouped by day, usually from the Thursday night game to Monday night, and each row has the two teams, a status and the stadium.
- A time such as 13:00 is the kickoff in US Eastern on a 24-hour clock. Games played abroad use Eastern time too, so a morning start can be an afternoon kickoff in Europe.
- Full time and a score replace the time once the game is over, and that final score is locked into the simulator's standings.
- TBD means the league has not set the time. Week 18 is the usual case: its kickoff times are announced only after Week 17, and the league can move some late-season games to other slots.
How the season and the playoffs are decided
The standings run on winning percentage, and a tie counts as half a win and half a loss. The 32 teams sit in two conferences, the AFC and the NFC, each made of four divisions of four. Seven teams per conference reach the playoffs: the four division winners are seeded 1 to 4 by record, and the three best of the rest take seeds 5 to 7 as wild cards. Only the top seed in each conference gets a bye. In the wild-card round the No. 2 seed hosts No. 7, No. 3 hosts No. 6 and No. 4 hosts No. 5. The bracket is reseeded after each round, with the higher seed hosting, so the No. 1 seed meets the lowest seed still alive.
Teams level on record are separated by a fixed list. Two clubs in the same division look first at head-to-head results, then at division record, record in common games and conference record. Two wild-card rivals from different divisions start with head-to-head if they met, then conference record, then common games with a minimum of four. Strength of victory and strength of schedule come next, then points-based rankings and net points, and a coin toss settles whatever is left. The league publishes the full procedure, and our tiebreakers explainer shows how often it has decided the last seat in a conference.
Playing out the rest of the season
The NFL simulator opens on the same schedule, one week at a time, with the AFC and NFC tables beside the games. Every game already played is locked with its real score, and the counter above the games shows how many of the open ones you have filled in.
- Type a score in the two boxes of any open game. Both tables re-sort as you type, and their header changes from Live standings to the number of results you have added.
- Simulate season lets the model fill every open game in the season and replaces whatever you typed. Simulate week fills only the week on screen and leaves your other weeks alone. Clear removes every score you or the model entered and returns to the real results.
- Move through the year with the arrows or the strip of week numbers. A week is marked complete once every game in it has a result.
- Each table lists the four division winners first, as seeds 1 to 4, then the three wild cards and then everyone else, each group ordered by winning percentage, then wins, then point differential. The legend marks the division winners and the wild cards; teams level on record are not split by the NFL's full tiebreakers.
- Nothing is stored: refresh the page and the real standings come back.
When the model fills a game it draws a score. Each team is rated on its point differential per game in 2025, and the gap between two ratings sets the expected margin: a team one standard deviation above average is about six points better than an average one. Playing at home adds 2.07 points, the margin home teams averaged across all 272 games of 2025, as our home-field advantage study measured. The spread of results comes from the same season, so stronger teams win more often and upsets still happen. Scores are rounded to totals that football can produce, and a tie is possible but rare, as in the real league.
What the simulator does not know
The ratings are fixed at 2025 results: they do not move as 2026 games are played, and they know nothing about injuries, trades or a new quarterback. The tables follow record rather than the full tiebreaker list, so two teams with the same record can sit in a different order than the league would put them. And one run is one possible season, not a forecast: simulate a few times, and a race that never changes is settled while one that flips every time is open. If you think the model misjudges a team, type the scores you expect for its games instead. The methodology page lists every constant.
Keep going
- NFL overtime rules, and how often games end in a tie explains why a tied score is possible in the simulator.
- NFL rest days covers byes, Thursday games and short weeks.
- The college game has its own pages: the FBS schedule and the AP Top 25.
Free, with no account. Nothing you enter is stored, so refreshing the page puts the season back to what really happened.