Admit it; if you follow the National Football League (NFL), both of the following statements are likely true: When talking about the preseason with friends, you say that the preseason doesn’t matter and doesn’t mean anything for the regular season, so you’re not really worried or excited about your team’s performance. However, you are worried or excited about your team’s performance.

All football fans say it doesn’t matter, but after so many months without football, we are desperate for anything meaningful. We want to see how the recent draftees perform, or how the defense is doing under a new coordinator, or a hundred other things. When our team gets blown out of the water by another team, we panic, a little. And when the Jaguars go 4–0 in the preseason, I and the other four Jaguars fans feel a little bit of hope.

So is it true that the preseason doesn’t matter?

Regression analysis of preseason vs. regular season winning percentage

I pulled data for the past three seasons to investigate. First, I looked at the preseason winning percentage (PCT-Pre) vs. the regular season winning percentage (PCT):

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