2025 Week 1 NFL Power Rankings

Ranking each team by neutral-field expected score differential, incorporating prior-season data, injury luck and roster changes this offseason

I’m going to walk through the process of getting to my Week 1 power rankings for the new season. These rankings are based on the point differentials we expect for every team playing on a neutral field against a league-average opponent. These numbers represent my best guesses for how relatively strong teams are, independent of their schedule.

• You can find the archive of power rankings from prior seasons here

• All the detailed information for year-end 2023 and 2024 power rankings, plus the initial 2025 rankings, are on the subscriber Google sheet (along with other site metrics).

REVIEWING 2024 POWER RANKINGS

Looking back at the fundamentals of how teams played last season, I’ve plotted the projected scoring rates (per play) on offense and defense for every team. This is largely derived from my game-level adjusted scores, which decay older results and give roughly 1.5x the weighting to offensive performance versus defensive, as the former is more "sticky" going forward.

The plot includes no adjustments for injuries at key positions or anything outside of what happened on the actual play on the field.

The Super Bowl Champion and media power ranking darling Philadelphia Eagles were in the top tier of teams to finish the season by my team strength metrics, but still trailing a handful of teams for the top spot. I know by the logic of “if team X beats team Y, then team X is better” the Eagles, by law, must be No. 1 in media rankings. You’ll see below that my numbers (and the assumptions of betting markets, for what it's worth) don’t quite have the Eagles as the strongest team in the NFL, though they are close.

The Eagles had the strongest defense in the NFL by my numbers last season, and defensive strength is simply less predictive than offensive performance, especially over the offseason. The same Eagles’ defense that led the NFL in 2024 was well below average in 2023. In fact, four of the top-5 defenses in 2024 were below average the prior season: Eagles, Packers, Texans & Broncos; the Vikings were also good in 2023.

The main differentiating factor between offensive and defensive stability is quarterback play. So much of offensive performance is determined by a single player who, most often (especially if they played well), will be the same year-over-year. Defensive performance not only lacks a singular figure like the quarterback but is comprised of higher-variance interactions between numerous players, many of whom shift in and out during the offseason. Defensive performance is also generally more influenced by the offenses they face—mostly the quarterbacks they face—than the reverse. The difficulty of opposing quarterbacks faced can vary greatly from season to season, either due to natural schedule changes, injuries to opponents, the age cliff for veteran signal-callers, or the breakouts of young ones.

On the flip side, the elite offenses from 2024 are all—barring quarterback injuries—highly likely to be in the top half of the NFL this season. In fact, four of the top five offenses, by my numbers, in 2024 were in the top seven the prior year (Bills, Ravens, Lions, & Chiefs). The exception was the Cincinnati Bengals, who were missing Joe Burrow for roughly 40% of the 2023 season.

ADJUSTMENTS FOR THE NEW NFL SEASON

IMPROVEMENT INDEX

The next step in projecting 2025 is incorporating player-level changes for each team. For that, I’m leveraging my Improvement Index for this offseason, which estimates on a points-basis how much each team’s current roster has improved versus what it was at the end of last season.

The power rankings also adjust for quarterback play if 2025 starters missed a lot of action in 2024 and should return healthy, but that’s a separate process. While the New England Patriots, Chicago Bears, and Carolina Panthers are leading the list here and get boosted in the power rankings, you must be careful not to overestimate the effect of roster additions in the offseason. It’s not that free agent signings, trade acquisitions, and draft picks can't help that much—some of the biggest contributors to team success are new faces on rosters. The lack of impact on power rankings reflects the difficulty in predicting which additions will be true breakout players and, conversely, which subtractions are most detrimental. On average, players added and subtracted from rosters have a marginal effect.

QUARTERBACK LUCK (OF LACK THEREOF)

I quantify and adjust for many of those factors in my Adjusted Quarterback Efficiency metric (AQE), illustrated below.

I don’t fully adjust go-forward projections for everything in AQE, as much of the scheme and receiver situations will be maintained going forward. However, more high-variance aspects of play, like turnover luck and drops, can be assumed to mostly regress to expectations. All quarterback results are part of the power rankings adjustments, but the plot below looks at only those quarterbacks with 250-plus play involvements (dropbacks plus designed quarterback runs).

Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson were both great last year, with a bit of luck to help boost their results. Jared Goff takes the biggest hit among the top performers, and he also lost former offensive coordinator Ben Johnson this offseason.

INJURIES: ADJUSTED GAMES LOST

The last element I’m adjusting the pure, on-field numbers from last season for is injuries. I make specific adjustments for veteran quarterback injuries that held down offensive results for teams last year, notably for the Dallas Cowboys, Jacksonville Jaguars, and Miami Dolphins, among others. Outside of the quarterback position, I’m leveraging the Adjusted Games Lost at FTN (brought over by Aaron Schatz, formerly of Football Outsiders) to measure the impacts of injuries last season to every team's offensive and defensive units.

The San Francisco 49ers were hit with the worst injury luck last season, by this metric. I was higher than most on the 49ers last year, but there was no mid-season bounceback—the roster basically fell apart by December. Perhaps it’s not surprising that my numbers are, once again, higher on the 49ers this year; they’re in the top 10.

The plot above treats all positional injuries on the same scale, but my adjustments give more weighting to higher positional value units (OL, WR, DB, ED) than the rest.

2025 WEEK 1 POWER RANKINGS

Below I explicitly contrast my numbers to the market, i.e. those derived by looking at the subsequent two weeks of NFL betting spreads.