The order if the season ended today

The board lists the 18 teams outside today’s playoff field, worst record first. Teams in the playoff field are named underneath, because they pick 19th or later no matter how bad their record looks next to a team below them: on Oct 19, 2026 the 3-2-1 Giants led their division, so they sit behind the 4-2 Ravens. When two records match, the team that played the easier schedule picks first, and the SOS column is that schedule’s combined winning percentage over all 17 opponents. Philadelphia and Houston are both 2-4 with an identical .465, so the board marks them as tied: the NFL settles that pair with further tiebreakers, and this page does not guess which one.

The worst pick your team can still get

Choose a team and set how many more games it wins. The big number is the latest pick it can land on, checked against every way the rest of the league’s games can go, including the games other bad teams play against each other. Dallas at 2-4 shows why this is worth counting: lose all 11 remaining games and the Cowboys pick no later than 6th, because only a handful of teams can finish with two wins or fewer at the same time. The Chargers are the extreme case. If they lose out, the 1st pick is theirs outright, since their December 27 game against winless Miami would hand the Dolphins a win.

The smaller line under the number covers ties. A team that finishes with the same record as yours can pick ahead of it or behind it depending on strength of schedule, and that number is still moving. The headline counts every such tie against you; the second figure is what you get if every tie goes your way.

The ladder: what each extra win costs

The step chart repeats that worst case for every number of wins left, so you can see the whole trade-off at once. For most teams near the bottom each extra win pushes the worst case back by about four places: Dallas goes from 6th with no more wins to 10th with one and 14th with two. The dashed line is the tie-friendly version. Once a step drops into the shaded band, the team could finish outside the top 18, and from there its pick depends on the playoffs.

Why the best case is usually the 1st pick

With most of the season still to play, almost every team can still be passed by everyone below it, so the best case reads 1st and says little. It starts to mean something late in the season, when some teams can no longer fall below yours. Whenever the best case is later than 1st, the calculator shows it along with how many teams are certain to finish below you.

This week’s games that move your pick

Below the board, the calculator lists the games of the coming week whose result changes your team’s worst case if it loses out, with the side to root for. Most games change nothing, and they are left off. For Dallas in week 7, two results pull the worst case from 6th to 5th: Tennessee beating Cleveland and the Jets beating Miami. Tankathon’s SOS Tiebreaker Rooting Help answers a narrower question, which games help one team’s strength of schedule against one rival; the list here counts records and schedule together.

What this page doesn’t count

The number shown is your team’s draft slot, not necessarily its pick. Traded first-rounders are not tracked here, and some of the teams on this board no longer own theirs: Dallas’s 2027 first-round pick belongs to the Jets. Check Tankathon for who owns each pick. Compensatory picks and the playoff seeding of a team whose record could still reach the postseason are also left out, which is why any worst case past 18th is shown as 19+. Results are refreshed every Tuesday after Monday Night Football.

Sources: draft order procedures from NFL Football Operations; schedule and results from nflverse; pick ownership and the SOS rooting tool from Tankathon.

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