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Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports

This is the time of year NFL fans and media alike start throwing around a meaningless phrase: "Playoff team." Did the XYZs add enough talent to become a playoff team? The ABCs couldn't possibly finish under .500—they're a playoff team!

The reality is if a team made the playoffs in 2014, it has little bearing on whether they'll do so in 2015. Several teams that qualified for the postseason last year have spent this spring adding talent yet will be left out in the cold come winter.

Every year since 1996, at least five teams missed the playoffs after making it the year before. The competitive balance of the NFL, and the high degree of randomness in its outcomes, means no team can take its place for granted.

The beautiful flipside of this harsh reality is that there's always hope. If at least five winning teams are going to lose out, five losing teams will get an invitation to the ball.

A longstanding principle of sports analytics is Pythagorean wins—the notion of how many games a team should have won based on their points scored and points allowed. As Doug Drinen of Sports-Reference.com explained, these expected-win values are a much stronger predictor of success the following year than actual wins.

In other words, teams that probably should have won more games than they did in 2014 will probably do much better in 2015.

Bleacher Report has perused losing records, favorable expected-wins differentials and a lot of other statistics to conclude the following teams could be in the mix for a playoff spot in 2015.