Which NFL Team Would Win in Scrabble?

Has anyone ever wondered which NFL team would win in Scrabble? Well, my roommate Dan Nolan did, and we decided to find out as best we could. I calculated the Scrabble point value for every player’s name in the NFL to find out which teams have the highest combined scores.

First, let’s look at the top 25 NFL players by Scrabble point value of their names.

These are some high scores. Strong performances by Jacquizz Rodgers, Kyle Juszcyzk, and Al-Hajj Shabazz due to the js and zs in their names. Now for the NFL team rankings.

And the Colts beat the Steelers in the Scrabble Super Bowl! Congratulations!

Not a bad showing by the home-team Washington Redskins (8th), except for the fact that the Dallas Cowboys and New York Giants came in 3rd and 4th, respectively. Still, I think most Redskins fans would be happy if they made the Divisional Round of the NFL Playoffs (quarterfinals) again this season.

EDIT: Apparently SB Nation did, in fact, wonder this in 2014. They only looked at the names of the teams, though, so I feel confident saying my ranking is better.

For those interested, the Jupyter Notebook with code to scrape the data from Fox Sports, score the names, and generate the graphs can be found in the Github repository for this post.