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NFL Championships Per Year

The Green Bay Packers are the winningest NFL franchise. If you watched one minute of Super Bowl coverage last year, you would have been told that. 10 times. But they are also one of the oldest teams in the NFL, founded in 1921. They were winning championships before most of the teams today existed, so their accomplishments aren’t all that great, right? Yes, they won a lot, but at what rate were they winning? How would they stack up against the rest of the league in terms of championships per year? As it turns out, quite well.

Using wikipedia as a source, a table was created listing every current NFL team. Years of eligibility are based on the first year the team is eligible to win the Super Bowl. Before the Super Bowl era, this is based on the first year the team is eligible for the NFL championship. Thus, no AFL championships are included, and NFL championships during 1966-1970 are not included. No AAFC championships are included.* Teams who have never won an NFL championship are listed in order from youngest to oldest. 

As a result, teams such as the New England Patriots and their three titles are ranked higher than the Washington Redskins and their five, due to Washington’s 34 more years of eligibility. Both the fledgling Baltimore Ravens and the long established Oakland Raiders are both winning Super Bowls at a rate of .067 per year. The aforementioned Packers are winning ~.05 more championships a year than the next closest team, their nearby rivals in Chicago.

Terribly useful? Perhaps not. But it is an interesting way to look at and define “success.”
* Let it go, Cleveland. It was a B-league and you know it.

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Most Valuable Cities in “Ticket To Ride”

Update 2016-08-14: This article was translated to Japanese by the team at Big Cats Game Blog.

Ticket To Ride is a great board game where the premise is that you’re a railroad baron at the start of the 20th Century. Along the way you collect “Destination Tickets” and you need to need to connect up two specific cities to score extra points.

Not all cities are created equal, however.  Some cities are represented on “Destination Tickets” more frequently, and some cities only have a few pathways into and out of the city.

We calculated the Most Valuable Cities in Ticket To Ride through a simple formula.  Add up the number of points that you get with a given city, and divide it by the number of paths connecting up that city.

For example, New York City has 57 points associated with it, but there are four paths into the city in a 2 or 3 player game, and seven paths in a 4 or 5 player game.  Compare that to Miami, which is worth 50 points but only has three paths regardless of how many people are playing.  This make Miami and much more “valuable” city to connect up with.

Essentially, the more “valuable” a city, the sooner you need to establish a train line into it.  If not, you run the risk of being cut off from any current points you have in your hand, and any future bonus points from already having a connection there.

We’ve crunched the numbers for the US Map and for all four versions of the game (Original, 1910, Big Cities, and Mega Game) and produced a PDF for your reference to use while you’re playing.

“Ticket To Ride” Most Valuable Cities downloadable PDF

And since we’re a site all about graphs, we offer some key information in graph form.

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