The 2008 Lions are the one season holding Detroit's preseason trend line down
Somebody in the r/detroitlions thread on Thursday asked for a scatter plot. Detroit only, preseason win rate against regular season win rate, one dot a season, trend line if there is one. Somebody else asked what the win totals actually look like for the teams that go undefeated in August.
Both of those are better questions than the thing they were asked about. Here are both charts, and the first one has a joke buried in it.
Twenty-five Detroit seasons, one dot each
Twenty-five seasons, 2000 through 2025. 2020 is not in there because there was no preseason that year. Dots are bigger where seasons landed on the same spot, which happens more than you'd think: 2000, 2016 and 2017 all went 2-2 in August and 9-7 after it.
The fit slopes up. r is +0.28, which works out to August explaining 8.1% of what the regular season did.
Now, 8.1% off 25 dots is not a finding, and I want to kill it before anybody quotes it. Shuffle which season goes with which August 20,000 times, keeping Detroit's actual numbers on both axes, and 17.1% of those shuffles produce a correlation at least as strong. Roughly 1 in 6. A line that chance draws that often is not a line.
The part that's funny
Take one season out at a time and refit, which is the standard check for whether a single point is carrying the answer.
| r | August explains | |
|---|---|---|
| All 25 seasons | +0.285 | 8.1% |
| Without 2008 | +0.514 | 26.4% |
| Without 2011 | +0.222 | 4.9% |
2008 is the season that flattens it. 4-0 in August, 0-16 after, sitting alone in the bottom right corner of the chart pulling the whole line down toward horizontal. Remove it and Detroit's preseason record starts looking like it predicts something.
That thread spent Thursday telling me 2008 had to be in the data. They were right, it's in now, and it turns out 2008 is the single strongest piece of evidence Detroit has ever produced for the thing they were arguing. The season everybody remembers as the punchline is doing real statistical work.
2011 is the other 4-0 August, and that team went 10-6 and made the playoffs. Take that one out instead and the correlation drops to +0.22. Two perfect Augusts, 3 years apart, one of them the worst season in NFL history and the other a playoff berth, and between them they're most of the reason the answer is nothing.
You don't get to drop the inconvenient dot, so the answer stands at +0.28 and 1 in 6. But knowing which single season is holding the number up or down is worth more than the number.
Detroit's average August across those 25 years is .497 and their average season is .401, which is a whole separate thing to sit with.
The other chart: where do undefeated preseason teams finish?
Every team since 2000 that won all of its preseason games. 68 of them out of 798 team-seasons. Bars are that group, the line is everybody, both as a share of their own group so the 68 and the 798 are comparable.
They finish everywhere. Raw win totals run from 0 to 14. The biggest single bucket is 10 wins with 10 teams in it, and the next 3 buckets down hold 8, 6 and
- There is no cluster.
45.6% of the undefeated group won 9 or more per 17. For everybody it's 46.9%.
That gap is the whole answer, and the reason the histogram was worth drawing rather than quoting an average. A tight pile around 8 wins would have meant an undefeated August genuinely makes you mediocre, which is a real claim. A smear across the entire range means August told you nothing about that specific team, which is a different claim, and it's the one the data supports.
Both ends of the range belong to somebody. Detroit 2008 and Cleveland 2017 went 0-16 out of perfect Augusts. New England 2003 and Baltimore 2019 went 14-2, and Minnesota 2024 went 14-3.
The caveat travels with the chart: 68 teams across 16 occupied buckets is somewhere between 1 and 10 teams per bar. Read the shape, don't read a bump.
Sources: ESPN's public schedule endpoint, cached in scripts/preseason_cache_2000.json, which is the same file behind the 798 team-season sample, so Detroit's rows here match the rows already published. 2020 excluded, no preseason was played. Ties count as half a win. Win rate on both axes of the scatter because preseasons are 3, 4 or 5 games and seasons are 16 or 17. Charts from one run each of scripts/lions_scatter_svg.py and scripts/undefeated_preseason_hist.py --svg.
Not betting advice. Just calls, made in public and kept in public.
Got a Detroit number you want looked at? Email projectunmuted@proton.me and it gets looked at properly. A stat somebody quoted that smells wrong, a thing you have always assumed about one of these 4 teams and have never seen checked. Every question that arrives is listed with its answer, including the ones where the answer is no.