I love cheese. Cheese is life. As a child, I remember going to the local grocery store with my mother, with one or two goals in mind: 1. To go to the dairy aisle to get a block of cheese; 2a. To go to the chips and snacks aisle to snag a bag of beef jerky; 2b. To go to said chips and snacks aisle to pick up a combination beef stick and cheese stick packaged in one. People really aren’t kidding when they say Wisconsin is the Dairy State, and there were varieties plentiful on display. But, seven-or-eight-year-old me did not know any better, and more often than not, I would convince my mother to come home with one of those Kraft’s Singles —and no, Robert, I’m not talking about the ones you find at spas… I’m sure you’ve had these before: the floppy, plasticky, yellow squares wrapped individually in plastic, all contained within a plastic packaging. Kraft’s Singles were my go-to, my manna from Piggly Wiggly.

Fast forward a dozen-plus years, and I find myself watching the NFC Championship Game. Green Bay versus Tampa Bay. Lambeau Field. Oh baby. My hand puts down the beer and brings up a chip laden with black bean and cotija cheese tastiness towards my mouth. Heart rate tachycardic; blood pressure hypertensive. Nothing like a Packers’ playoff game to ramp up the blood pressure.

If you are reading this, then you already know the results of the game. Some good, a lot bad, and even more ugly. Another year, another crushing Packers playoff loss. Another disappointing end to an otherwise sparkling regular season.

In the time that I’ve watched the Packers, from the early 2000s and onwards, I have been quite fortunate to have seen some excellent teams in action: Favre’s last hurrah of 2007, the loaded secondary of 2010 (goodness me, I miss Woodson and Collins), the offensive juggernaut of 2011, and the number one seeded team of 2020. Perhaps throw in the 2016 and 2019 Packers that clawed their way to reach the NFC Championship Game. Was there even a 2014 postseason?

After having several days to marinate this latest loss, I came to wonder – what has been the best Packers’ regular season? For the Packers, if I had to guess, I would put my money on the 1996 Packers squad led by the Gunslinger and the Minister of Defense, or perhaps one of the teams from the golden Lombardi years. But how about for the league as a whole?

The excellent statistical site 538.com already provides Elo-based ratings for all NFL teams, and I encourage you to check that out if you haven’t already. A big plus of 538 is that their ratings also include the postseason. However, I didn’t want to just go to their website and get the answer with the click of a few buttons. So, instead, I opted to use pro-football-reference.com. Specifically, I looked at the expected win-loss for each team’s season using the so-called Pythagorean Theorem, a formula that calculated a team’s expected win-loss based off points for and points against. No trigonometry necessary! With only two variables, it is a very simple formula, so I am not going to overanalyze the statistical backing of it, but I think it would be a fun to carry out the following analyses (regular season only): 1. Top-ten Green Bay Packers Seasons; 2. Top Regular Season for each NFL team; 3. Top Ten Overall Regular Seasons.

Pro Football Reference presents their metric as “Expected W-L: X.X – Y.Y,” where X.X is the expected number of wins and Y.Y is the expected number of losses, both to the tenth (as seen in the image below, when the 2020 Arizona Cardinals had an Expected W-L of 9.0 – 7.0).