What it does
/bracket renders the league's current playoff picture as a full bracket image — both AFC and NFC sides — with seeded teams, byes, and (once the postseason starts) winners filled in. Logos are pulled from the per-league relocation map, so a relocated franchise shows its current brand mark, not the league-default one.
Pass show_details:true and the bot adds a Monte Carlo odds embed underneath the bracket: each team's probability of making the playoffs, winning their division, and grabbing a top seed, plus the key remaining games that will move those odds the most.
How to use
/bracket — Render the current playoff picture
/bracket show_details:true — Add per-team odds + key-games breakdown
Examples
/bracket— the bracket image alone. Great for weekly recap posts./bracket show_details:true— adds the Monte Carlo embed. Heavier render, useful late in the regular season when seedings are still up in the air.
Notes
- Available all season. Pre-playoffs, the bracket reflects the projected seeding from the current standings. Once Wildcard starts, results from the EA export fill the bracket in real time.
- Bracket image is rendered server-side via
node-canvason top of a static playoff-picture template. The team-logo PNGs ship with the bot undersrc/images/nfl_logos. - Relocation-aware. If your league has a relocated franchise (e.g. "Las Vegas → Sacramento Raiders"), the bracket pulls the current brand abbr from the relocation map and uses the matching logo.
- Monte Carlo runs ~10k simulated remaining seasons to estimate odds. The breakdown embed is rebuilt fresh on each call (no cache), so two consecutive runs may show slightly different probabilities late in the season when each game shifts the distribution.
Common questions
Q: The image came back broken or missing logos.
A: Most often a missing logo PNG for a recently relocated/added team. Ping a commish — they can drop the logo into src/images/nfl_logos/ (or update the relocation map to point at an existing one).
Q: show_details:true timed out.
A: The Monte Carlo runs against the linked Madden export's schedule. If the export is unusually large or the bot is under load, the embed builder can hit Discord's 3-second ACK window. Re-run; the second call is faster because canvas + template are warm in memory.
Q: A team that's mathematically eliminated still shows odds. A: The simulator runs all remaining games, so a team with a path through 5 unlikely wins still gets a non-zero %. The "key remaining games" line will flag this.
Q: How is this different from /playoffs?
A: /bracket is the visual picture. /playoffs post is the picks system — it posts every game in a round as a pickable matchup. Use both: /bracket for the league recap, /playoffs post for the predictions league.