Thanks, and yes, this was a collaboration with Kevin Quealy and Shan Carter.
The development process was incremental: first create a simple representation of the league (conferences, divisions, teams) and schedule (games, outcomes), then implement the necessary metrics (win percentage, strength-of-victory, etc.) and filters (e.g., head-to-head, common games), then finally the tie-breaking algorithm itself.
The incremental approach let me test the parts independently and reduce the amount of hair-pulling debugging unlikely scenarios. Though, there was still plenty of that… Fortunately the NFL has an official playoff computer I could use to test my implementation (for a single, complete scenario).
The development process was incremental: first create a simple representation of the league (conferences, divisions, teams) and schedule (games, outcomes), then implement the necessary metrics (win percentage, strength-of-victory, etc.) and filters (e.g., head-to-head, common games), then finally the tie-breaking algorithm itself.
The incremental approach let me test the parts independently and reduce the amount of hair-pulling debugging unlikely scenarios. Though, there was still plenty of that… Fortunately the NFL has an official playoff computer I could use to test my implementation (for a single, complete scenario).