Category Archives: Power Rankings

NFL Power Rankings, Power Rankings

Power rankings heading into the final month of the 2024 NFL season:

At this point, 14 weeks of NFL action are in the books and we’re entering the home stretch. With 17 games, there’s no perfect solution mathematically, but all teams have now had their bye weeks and have four more contests remaining before the playoff picture is finalized.

Seven teams have already been eliminated while four have clinched playoff berths – and even division titles on the AFC side of things. That means five more sports are still up for grabs on either half of the bracket, although realistically, there is a pretty wide gap between the franchises who simply have to take care of business on their end compared to ten times “in the hunt” officially but sat below .500.

As always, these are power *rankings* rather than standings, meaning teams with worse records may be listed above others with slightly better results so far or who they’ve lost to directly. The purpose of this exercise is to project how many of the other 31 franchises each side would beat head-to-head right now and not weigh likelihood of securing a certain seed in the postseason or compare to results from months ago.

Let’s dig in:

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NFL Power Rankings, Power Rankings

Power Rankings after the first quarter of the 2024 NFL season:

We’re a month into the NFL season and as always for me, this is the first time to take the temperature of the league, stacking up all 32 teams against one another. Records are obviously the biggest indicator, but especially with how the early season has played out, I think there’s quite a significant discrepancy between the quality of team and the first number next to their name in several cases.

Whenever I post any list like this, I like to remind people that these are power “rankings” rather than standings – anybody can simply look those up themselves and I did add records next to each squad. However, you will see groups with slightly worse records placed above others, who may have benefitted from a weaker schedule so far or just weren’t as impressive to me in the way they were able to emerge victorious. The same is true for one side outranking another, who they might’ve lost to already, since this is intended to be a placement based on how many sides everybody should be favored against at this moment, rather than one specific matchup.

Let’s get to it:


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NFL Power Rankings, Power Rankings

NFL power rankings after the first quarter of the 2023 season:

We’re one month into the NFL season and it’s time for our first power rankings over the year. While there are teams we feel more or less confident about in our opinions on them, generally I believe we have a good understanding for who the main contenders in both conferences are and which ten plus/minus two teams have a legit shot at lifting up that Lombardi trophy in February. At the same time, there may be about the same amount of groups I feel like don’t have real playoff aspirations. That’s why the middle of the pack may end up being so interesting, to see who still rises of falls.

As always, these are rankings, not standings. I did not want to simply list teams by record and then shuffle them around a bit, but rather actually evaluate how good these 32 franchises are right now. I will incorporate a lot of numbers to support my case, but also try to add the needed context to them, based on what I see on film. That means even if we have two teams with the same record and one of them beat the other head-to-head, that doesn’t automatically determine their order.

Let’s get into the list:



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NFL Power Rankings, Power Rankings

Pre-2022 NFL season power rankings:

We’ve nearly made it through the preseason and once again it’s time to put out my first power rankings of the year, before the Bills and Rams kick off the regular season.

To do so, not only did I rank all teams from numbers one to 32, but I also grouped them into six tiers. Each of those consists of four to six teams, other than what I labelled as the “second tier”, which is loaded with AFC teams in particular, who I believe all have the talent to make real noise this season.

As always, I know many people will hate how low their team is and sometimes the number in front of it may look worse than it actually is, which is why I’d like to consider the individual tiers, which is what I believe is more representative of how I look at the NFL landscape heading into 2022.

Let’s get into the list:


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Power Rankings

NFL Power Rankings after the first quarter of the ’21 season:

As I always do after the first four games of a season, I wanted to rank all 32 teams once again. Unfortunately, with the 17th game added, it’s not exactly a quarter of the season anymore and we’ll have to see how that impacts teams down the road, who may otherwise have already pre-determined their outcome for the full year, but I think at this point we have a pretty good indication of where almost everybody stands.

The thing I want to make very clear here is that these are my personal rankings and I judge what I’ve seen on the field, rather than what the records say. So there may a couple of 2-2 teams over others at 3-1 for example, as I don’t want to be a prisoner of the moment.

So looking at this whole list, I wanted to quickly share my general thought on the individual teams, aided by a couple of key statistics, but I’m more than willing to discuss certain rankings, maybe in comparison to others, in the comments or on my social media outlets (links in the top bar).

Now let’s go through this list:

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NFL Offseason, NFL Power Rankings, Power Rankings

NFL teams most likely to go from worst to first in 2021:

We have spent a lot of time on analyzing what NFL teams have done this offseason to improve their roster, detailing every single draft pick, discussing the most improved position groups and pointing out the biggest remaining needs for every single squad. Now it’s time to project how these moves will impact the outcome of the 2021 season, in regards to how much the bottom teams have improved and their chances to turn things around.

So here I listed the teams, that just finished fourth in their respective division, and ranked them based on the likelihood of winning it this year. I will describe the team itself, including some of the changes on the roster and coaching staff, talk about the challenges they will face inside their division and take a look at the schedule a little bit, in order to determine their chances of hosting a playoff game come next January. I also added a percentage at the very end, that I would give them of doing so.

Let’s get into it:

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Power Rankings

NFL Power Rankings heading into the final three weeks of the 2020 season:

As crazy as this sounds, we are only three weeks away from the NFL playoffs and the picture is starting to manifest itself. In this breakdown I’m ranking all 32 teams and I use different tiers to describe how I feel about them. While there are plenty of statistics to support the cases I want to make for them, I tried to limit those to a smaller degree, because at this point of the season it’s all about what I have learned from studying them every week and what my eyes tell me.

Here we go:

 

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Power Rankings

Top 10 defenses in the NFL after ten weeks:

Scoring in the NFL is at an all-time high. There are so many young, exciting quarterbacks and we see passing records being broken every single week, especially with Tom Brady and Drew Brees going back and forth for the title as the all-time touchdown leader. However, the best teams in this league still play great defense. Some of them may have the individual talent while others do a better job of game-planning and putting their players in position to succeed, but when we talk about the really special units, that’s where both those things come together.

I want to look at the top ten defenses in the NFL as of right now, which of course is largely based on what they have done through ten weeks, but I try to put things into context in terms of who they have played and how some of the statistics or point totals came to be. And funnily enough, only the very last one on the list is below-.500, while eight of these teams have won at least six games.

Make sure to also check out my detailed recap of week ten!

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Power Rankings

NFL Power Rankings after the first quarter of the 2020 season:

Now that the first four weeks of the NFL season are in the books and we have a pretty good idea about who all these teams are, while the results may not fully tell the story yet, I decided to put them all in order for the first version of my Power Rankings in-season. Funnily enough my number one and 32 teams are still the same that I had when I put out my list a couple of weeks before the year was kicked off. Once again, I’m not trying to just put these teams in order by their record – for that you can check the official standings on NFL.com – but rather I tried to figure out how I would personally rank them based on the tape I’ve watched and with some stats to help me put it all in context.

This is my list:

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Power Rankings

Best triplets in the NFL going into 2020:

After a week off, I am back with a vengeance! Since this was kind of a trending topic a few weeks ago and I saw a lot of media outlets/networks put out their rankings of the top triplets in the NFL, I thought I needed to put myself into the conversation and right some of wrongs that were done.

This list only includes combinations of one quarterback, running back and wide receiver each. That means no players beyond that and no consideration of the offensive scheme or play-caller, as much as that’s possible. And to lay the ground rules – all three positions are weighed equally. So just because you have one of the elite quarterbacks doesn’t necessarily put you up there and if one of those spots doesn’t have a really good player, I don’t care how great the other two are.

So with that being said, here is my list of the best trios in the league:

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