How the quiz works
Each day the date picks five situations from 1,200 real 2025 regular-season snaps, chosen so that every range of win probability, from long shots to near-certainties, turns up equally often. For each one you set a probability that the team with the ball wins the game. The site’s win probability model then shows its own estimate, and the final result of the real game decides who was closer.
Both of you are graded with the Brier score, the mean squared distance between a forecast and what happened. It is the same measure the site’s Elo backtest uses for pregame forecasts and the one explained in what makes a good win probability model.
Reading a game state
The strip shows the field from the offense’s point of view: the violet line is the line of scrimmage, the dashed magenta line the line to gain. The pregame spread is written from the offense’s side, so “favored by 3.5” means the market expected the offense to win by 3.5 before kickoff. Late in games the clock and the score matter most; early on, the spread carries more of the information.
What a good score looks like
A daily Brier score below 0.20 means the guesses carried real information; the model lands around 0.16 over a full season. Two habits help most. First, respect the clock: with ten minutes left a one-score lead is far from safe, with one minute left it usually is. Second, avoid the extremes unless the game is truly over, because a single confident miss at 95 percent costs more than twenty careful guesses near the middle gain back.
Frequently asked questions
Where do the game situations come from?
Every situation is a real snap from the 2025 NFL regular season in the nflverse play-by-play data: the score, clock, field position, down, distance and pregame spread exactly as they were, with team abbreviations shown.
How is my guess scored?
With the Brier score: the squared difference between your probability and the outcome, 1 if the offense won and 0 if it lost. Lower is better. Guessing 50 percent every time scores 0.25.
Why does a confident correct guess score so well?
The Brier score rewards probabilities that match how often things happen. Saying 95 percent and being right costs 0.0025; saying 95 percent and being wrong costs 0.9025. Overconfidence is punished hard.
What model am I playing against?
The same logistic regression that powers the NFL win probability calculator on this site, fitted on 2016 to 2024 plays and never trained on 2025. It is simple on purpose, so beating it is possible.
Is it the same quiz for everyone?
Yes. The five situations are chosen from the date, so everyone gets the same set on the same day. A new set starts at midnight UTC.