As we look at NFL records, it’s sometimes tempting to create narratives around various teams, based on their win-loss records. Notionally, the AFC East is playing an easy schedule (against the NFC East and the AFC South) but how much should we question that effect on their rankings? Which divisions are more or less competitive, and which ones are stronger?

Starting with the Football Outsiders Defense-Adjusted Value Over Average (DVOA) team metrics, we can try to build a narrative about teams (all data behind this storytelling is from the 2015 Week 10 DVOA Ratings). Since these ratings include both a team value and a variance of that value, we can compare the normal distributions of two teams to answer the question, “How often will Team A beat Team B on a neutral field?”

A necessary question, of course, is “what does an average” division look like? An average divisions has four teams with DVOAs around 18%, 5.4%, -4.6%, and -18.8%, and variances in the 10-15% range. Given that average division, we can compare any NFL division to it, and calculate how many games we expect the NFL division to win against the average division (in a 16-game tourney). Since we’re going to use the average division from this year, the average of all NFL division expected wins will be 8. The strongest division so far is the AFC East, with 11.36 expected wins; the weakest is the AFC south, with 4.10 expected wins. Most divisions are within 1.5 wins of average.

We also would like to understand how competitive a division is. For this, we can simulate an intra-division round-robin of 6 games, and look at how distributed the wins are, on a scale of 0 (the top three teams have the same expected wins) to 1 (the top three teams have an impossibly far apart distribution of wins).

The Gauntlet Divisions

Four divisions are competitive, while also being stronger than average. A very competitive pair in the AFC West and NFC East, and a mildly competitive pair in the NFC West and AFC North. The Broncos wild start notwithstanding, Kansas City is potentially a better team, but right in the neighborhood, and the Raiders aren’t far behind. The NFC East is the coin-toss NFC East, with teams that are much closer to average than any other division. The NFC West has two very good teams (Cardinals/Seahawks at 2nd and 5th), as does the ADC North (Bengals/Steelers at 3rd and 6th).

The Cupcake Division

The AFC South, however, is interesting. No other division’s fourth best team is expected to win more than 0.55 games against their three division rivals (and that’s the Saints), but the Titans are expected to win 1.19. Given that with perfect parity, the fourth-best team can’t win more than 1.5 games, that’s a pretty surprising number. Any of these teams could win the division - but we’d expect all of them to be steamrolled by another division (the worst team in the AFC East has a higher DVOA than the best team in the AFC South).

The Cakewalk Division

Some divisions crown their winner early, not because the winner is necessarily that great, but because their competition is that weak. The NFC South obviously fits into this category; Carolina is really good, but Atlanta, the second-best team, is barely good enough to be the third-best team in an average division. Surprisingly, the NFC North also lands here, even though the Vikings at 7-2 are above the Packers at 6-3. In a weird scheduling quirk, while the Packers schedule has been pretty evenly distributed, the Vikings average opponent to date has been 9.7% worse than average (the second easiest schedule so far), while their future opponents average 9.1% better than average (the hardest schedule remaining). Unless the Vikings step up, that’s going to create a narrative of a late-season “collapse.”

The Tyrant Division

Or, as Rex Ryan might call it, the Bully Division. The AFC East expects to win a surprising 11.36 games in a 16 game tourney against an average division. Unfortunately for every team not the Patriots, the Patriots expect to win 2.84 out of 3 games when playing the Bills, Dolphins, and Jets. But there’s a tyrant atop this division, ruling with an iron fist, and they don’t intend to give up their throne easily. But the contenders in the shadows are good, and arguably better than many division leaders.