No, the Kansas City Chiefs preseason record doesn't matter

Every one has heard it. Everyone says it. Preseason wins and losses don't matter. Let's see if that is actually true, shall we?

Using preseason and regular season wins from the past five seasons we can have a glimpse as to whether or not preseason wins actually mean anything when it comes to playing games that count.  Below is a graph that compares NFL preseason wins against regular season wins from 2010 to 2014.

Looks like a bunch of dots to me .... Where are you getting at with this? These bunch of dots do look pretty random. Just from an 'eye ball' test one could probably deduce that preseason wins don't mean much. However, just eye-balling a graph doesn't count for much. I've eye-balled a lot of things in my lifetime and the results at times were not what I expected. That's neither here nor there though.

So let's take it a step further. Let's go into hardcore nerd mode and apply some statistics to this data.

(Disclaimer: If you don't like math, RUN! If you do like math though, this could be a bit of a treat.)

A common way to see if two numbers are related in statistics is done by calculating a correlation coefficient. Basically the correlation coefficient gives a value between -1 and 1 that describes whether or not a certain data point is negatively or positively correlated with a certain outcome. A value near 0 would mean no correlation. In this instance the data point is a team's preseason win total and the outcome is winning games in the regular season. The correlation coefficient method chosen was the Pearson's Correlation Coefficient.

After crunching the numbers the correlation coefficient for NFL preseason wins vs. regular season wins from 2010 to 2014 was 0.1048.  Aha! Over the past five seasons there is little to no relation between preseason wins and regular season wins. Preseason wins matter about as much as the celery in Andy Reid's fridge (I kid, I kid.)

Now for our own entertainment lets see how the Chiefs have done in the past five seasons in terms of preseason wins vs regular season wins.

Just for fun let's make some ridiculous statements about this graph:

• The Chiefs have been awful in the preseason for the past five years. .500 is the best they've been! They lose meaningless games.
• Everyone wants their team to win meaningful games, but what does it mean if teams lose meaningless games ... That has to be good right? Or maybe it's just not bad?
• If these little red dots were moving I bet my cat would try to attack them.
• The Chiefs preseason wins appear to correlate somewhat to regular season wins by this graph, it's science.
• Since two preseason wins got the Chiefs 11 regular season wins in 2013, can you imagine how many wins the Chiefs would get if they won three preseason games? It'd have to be at least 13 you'd think???