Before we make our fearless NFL playoff picks—and congratulations to the New York Jets, who qualified for the postseason despite being mathematically eliminated by their own head coach—we must attend to some unsavory business: figuring out this season's worst NFL team. Therefore, we present the Misfit Bowl tournament, our first (sure to be annual) playoff series that determines the league's most wobegone franchise. The Misfit Bowl playoffs take eight teams total, the four worst in each conference—sorry, Seattle, Buffalo nudges you out because the AFC needs one more bad team—and pits them head-to-head. Seeds are awarded on the basis of the worst record—St. Louis, at 1-15, is #1 in the NFC—and home field goes to the better of the two teams. The team that loses moves on to the next round—and three losses crowns a Misfit Bowl champ. Because we want to crunch this out scientifically, we've turned to our friends at AccuScore, the sports-forecasting service, which took into account each club's strengths (ha) and weaknesses (gulp) and current injuries (like Detroit's done-for-the-year QB Matthew Stafford) and simulated each game 10,000 times before issuing a well-considered final score.[Read more...]