However, you are being misled. Very lightly and subtly, but misled nonetheless. The trouble is that these are great reference tables, but bad data visualizations -- and the key inclusion of color is ensuring that your eyes are interpreting these graphics as both.

By coloring in each entry according to the winning team, the grid moves beyond being a dry reference table and takes on a new life as a kind of area map. We’re not just looking at this to see how many goals Dallas needs to score if Seattle scores one, we’re looking at that huge wave of rave green and that tiny dot of red and thinking “wow Dallas are screwed.”

Which, as it happens, they are. But yet these graphics are still being sloppy in communicating how much -- especially for the other closer games. More space is communicating better chances, so the shape and size of each entry in the grid matters. There are two ways in which I think the existing graphics fall short on this front:

uneven axes and rectangular grids over representing low frequency results

Ultimately, adjusting for both of these aspects would leave us with something more like this: