San Francisco 49ers: How Important Is Week 11's Game Against the New York Giants

How important is this week for the San Francisco 49ers?  They take on the New York Giants in a game they’re favored to win—up by 3.5 points, according to Odds Shark. 

They have to deal with the season-ending injury to Patrick Willis, and they get to figure out how to reincorporate the returning Aldon Smith.  It’s the difference between keeping pace with the top NFC teams and dropping back to .500.  That seems pretty important, doesn’t it?

On the other hand, even in the worst-case scenario for this week, the 49ers will still be alive in the playoff hunt.  While they don’t control their own playoff fate, the odds of all of the teams ahead of them winning out is very slim.  If the 49ers go 6-1, the odds are highly in their favor that they’d make up the ground they need for the playoff race, while anything less than that would require more significant outside help.

The 49ers need to catch two of Arizona, Seattle, the Dallas/Philadelphia loser and the Detroit/Green Bay loser to get into the playoffs.  Since those teams all have games left against one another, it would be a very bizarre scenario indeed that saw the 49ers stay at home at 11-5.

Record	#1 seed	#2 seed	#3 seed	#4 seed	#5 seed	#6 seed	No playoffs
12-4	14%	21%	7%	<1%	56%	2%	<1%
11-5	1%	6%	8%	<1%	65%	19%	1%
10-6	<1%	<1%	2%	<1%	31%	45%	21%
9-7	<1%	<1%	<1%	<1%	5%	23%	72%
8-8	0%	0%	0%	0%	<1%	2%	98%
7-9	0%	0%	0%	0%	0%	<1%	>99%
6-10	0%	0%	0%	0%	0%	0%	100%

So the question is, how important is this game, as opposed to any of the other six remaining on the schedule?

There are a couple of ways to answer that question.  One way is to try to figure out how much each individual game would alter the 49ers’ playoff probability, independent of the other games.

There is a tool, located at nfl-forecast.com, which allows you to predict the rest of the 2014 season with incredible degrees of precision.  Rather than simply picking winners in each game, the tool gives you a slider to adjust probability. 

For example, rather than saying the 49ers will beat the Oakland Raiders, you could say the 49ers have a 75 percent chance of beating them or a 90 percent chance of losing or anything in-between.  By default, it’s loaded with odds based on the efficiency rankings from Advanced Football Analystics, but you can set those odds to whatever you desire.

By comparing the 49ers' odds of making the playoffs with a win in each game to their odds of making it with a loss, you can get a hierarchy of the most important games remaining:

1. Week 15 @ Seattle: 35 percent
2. Week 13 v. Seattle: 33 percent
3. Week 17 v. Arizona: 26 percent
4. Week 11 @ NY Giants: 25 percent
5. Week 12 v. Washington: 23 percent
6. Week 16 v. San Diego: 19 percent
7. Week 14 @ Oakland: 19 percent

Otto Greule Jr/Getty Images

This makes intuitive sense.  The games against the Seattle Seahawks and Arizona Cardinals are most important not only because they’re in the division but also because they’re two of the six teams the 49ers are trying to catch. 

Sweeping those three games would give the 49ers about an 85 percent shot of making the playoffs, regardless of what happens in any other game.  The Seahawks games are more important because the 49ers are more likely to catch them, just based on current win-lose totals.

After that, you have the two NFC matchups, including this week’s matchup against the Giants.  The reason this week is ever-so-slightly more important than next week against Washington is a potential common-games tiebreaker against the Detroit Lions; the Lions beat the Giants 35-14 back in Week 1, while Washington’s NFC North matchup was against Minnesota and thus irrelevant.

Finally, the two AFC matchups are of roughly equal importance, because they would only matter in tiebreakers against Arizona and Seattle—the common-games tiebreaker.  Assuming the 49ers are stuck in wild-card position, a win against either team wouldn’t help against the likes of Dallas or Green Bay, other than the obvious fact that winning is better than losing.

So, just based on that, the 49ers should just focus on winning their six most important games, and not care about the result of Week 14 at Oakland.  As long as they win the other six, they’ll likely be just fine.

You may notice the flaw there—the game in Oakland is going to be significantly easier, in theory, than the game the next week in Seattle.  Sure, the Seahawks game is more important, but it certainly would be easier to go 6-1 with a loss in Seattle than it would with a loss in Oakland.

So, another way to look at which game is most important is to take odds of winning into account.  If we accept that 6-1 is the record the 49ers will need to essentially guarantee themselves a playoff spot, what are the odds of them doing that if they lose this week?  What are the odds if they lose in Oakland?  And so forth.

There are a number of ways of calculating a team’s odds of winning any individual game.  One simple and publically accessible way to do it is to use FiveThirtyEight.com’s ELO ratings—the site even provides the formula for you to calculate a team’s odds of winning each and every game.

Here, then, are the 49ers' odds of winning every remaining game, according to 538, and their odds of going 6-1 if they lose each game.

Game	Odds to win	Odds of winning other 6 games
Week 11 @ NY Giants	64.3%	4.7%
Week 12 v. Washington	84.8%	3.5%
Week 13 v. Seattle	52.6%	5.7%
Week 14 @ Oakland	83.2%	3.6%
Week 15 @ Seattle	34.4%	8.7%
Week 16 v. San Diego	67.3%	4.5%
Week 17 v. Arizona	54.4%	5.5%

This highlights why the game against the Giants is so important—losing it means the 49ers almost have to sweep Seattle and Arizona to have a chance at the playoffs, and that’s a tough proposition.  These ELO numbers imply that the 49ers could only do that about 10 percent of the time, while the odds of winning at least two out of three are closer to 45 percent.

A loss this week, then, pushes the 49ers to the brink.  Gone would be any real margin of error they had in their playoff run, with three very tough games remaining.  I would go so far as to say that this week’s game is the most important road game the 49ers have left on their schedule. 

While a win in CenturyLink against the Seahawks would help the 49ers more, it’s better to think of that game as an opportunity—a bonus, as it were.  It’s a chance to knock the Seahawks essentially out of the race, but it’s also good to not need it to make the playoffs.

Is this, then, the most important game left on the schedule for the 49ers?  Well, again, no.  I actually think that’s next week against Washington—if the 49ers somehow manage to bungle a home game against a 3-6 team travelling across the country, they wouldn’t deserve to make the playoffs. 

They’ve already had two major blunders against the Chicago Bears and St. Louis Rams at home; a third could well be the final nail in the coffin.

Christian Petersen/Getty Images

I also would consider the Thanksgiving Day game against the Seahawks more important because of the opportunity it presents.  Home teams have historically done better than expected on Thursday nights—the short turnaround time benefits the home team more than the road team. 

In addition, Seattle will be coming off tough back-to-back games against the Kansas City Chiefs and Arizona Cardinals and should be more exhausted.  It’s the 49ers' best chance of hanging a win on one of their playoff rivals left, so I’d consider that more important than beating the Giants on the road.

So, how important is this week’s game against the New York Giants?  It’s certainly very important, in that any loss to a non-playoff-caliber team at this point would cripple the 49ers’ playoff hopes. 

However, considering both odds of victory and the actual impact of each win, this week’s game is only middle-of-the-pack.  If it’s possible to differentiate between must-win games, this falls slightly lower on the proverbial totem pole.

Don’t misunderstand me—losing this game would be a Giant blow to the 49ers’ playoff hopes and would be cause for much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments.  Every game left in the season is exceptionally important.  It’s just that other losses would hurt the 49ers more at this point.

Bryan Knowles is a featured columnist for Bleacher Report, covering the San Francisco 49ers.  Follow him @BryKno on Twitter.