Vast majority of Detroit Lions fans believe playoff hopes are within reach

This week’s SB Nation Reacts surveys focused on two questions: our weekly confidence poll and a projection on how the Detroit Lions will finish out their final four games of the regular season.

Let’s start with the weekly confidence poll. The Lions have won five of their last six games, and each week, fans' confidence in the direction of the team climbs. When they beat the Packers in Week 9, confidence grew from 56% to 82%, then jumped up to 91% after their win over the Bears. The victory over the Giants brought confidence up to 96%, and it held at 96% after the close loss to the Bills. Smashing the Jaguars saw confidence rise up to 98%, and just when it looked like they couldn’t go up anymore, they beat the now 10-3 Vikings by two scores.

At 6-7, with four games remaining in the season, and the hopes of a playoff birth in the balance, Lions fans' confidence that the team is headed in the right direction is now at a whopping 99%. The highest it’s been under the general manager Brad Holmes/coach Dan Campbell’s regime.

With confidence at a season-high, and four winnable games left on the schedule, the second question we asked Lions fans this week was what Detroit’s record would be over those remaining games.

As Jeremy Reisman noted in our latest “playoffs odds” article, if the Lions go 4-0 down the stretch, they’ll have around an 85-93% chance of making the postseason depending on the predictive model, while if they go 3-1, those odds drop to between 30-43%. A 2-2 or lower record all but seals their fate that they’d miss out this year.

The results didn’t fully match the confidence survey’s optimism, but there were still 87% of Lions’ fans predicting an outcome that would keep the Lions’ hopes of the playoffs alive.