Near misses

Hindsight is undefeated

25 seasons of matchups, reconstructed down to the individual player-week. 561 losses would have been wins with one lineup change — but only about half of those are calls anybody would actually second-guess.

0.05 of a point, across 2,358 decided games — 2,383 played, 25 of them tied.

561 games turned on one slot

Of the 2,211 losses where the lineup can be reconstructed, 561 would have flipped on one legal substitution — 25% of the losses we can check. Which sounds damning until you ask what the coach actually knew on Sunday morning, and the pile splits almost evenly in two.

The ones you'd take back 261

The player on the bench had been the better player all season. These are the starts that are genuinely hard to defend — the coach had the evidence and went the other way.

Nobody was starting him 300

And these are the other 300: the coach started his better player, by season average, and the week simply went the other way. You do not bench an elite stud for somebody's WR3, and nobody in this league ever has. A stud who lays an egg is not a bad decision, it is Sunday.

Legal is doing real work in all of this. A substitution counts only if the eight that result still fill that era's slots, matched against the league's own lineup — so you cannot bench a defence for a receiver. The CBS era changed shape four times between 2002 and 2020 and each season is checked against its own. The split between the two piles is the season average each player was carrying that year, which is the closest thing the archive has to what a coach knew at the time.

Most games are not close

Every decided game in the archive, by final margin.

The lineup you already had

With perfect hindsight — the best legal eight the roster could have fielded that week — 833 of those losses turn into wins, and the average team-week leaves 14.3 points on its own bench. These are the five worst.

The best any of them ever were

One week per position, because a single list is six quarterbacks and tells you only that quarterbacks score more. Scored under the rules in force that season.

Who leaves the most on the table

One-swap losses per coach against games coached, for everyone with at least 100 games. A rate, not a verdict — you only get one of these by being close enough to lose narrowly.