Week 16 NFL Power Rankings

The Rams at the top, and a long list of second-tier teams who have a shot at making a run to the Super Bowl

* Apologies for the delay here. I was laid out with the flu yesterday. I’ll be back on schedule going forward

The Week 16 power rankings combine the initial, Week 1 power rankings I released and the evidence from four weeks of NFL football. The key in updating the rankings is knowing when to not overreact (Lions taking a shellacking in Green Bay) and when to be aggressively moving assumptions (maybe the Colts offense will be functional with a real NFL quarterback). Right now, the rankings incorporate roughly 95/5 mix of team strength based on this and last season’s performance.

For more info you can find the archive of previous Power Rankings posts, including the Week 1 rankings that detail much of the methodology of coming up with .

In this post, I’m going to walk through how my team-strength model views every team offensively and defensively for their 2025 performance going into Week 16, plus comparisons of my numbers to those derived by looking out over the next two weeks on the betting markets.

TEAM OFFENSIVE AND DEFENSIVE STRENGTH

*Downloadable power ratings/rankings available in the paid subscriber Google sheet.

For what seems like the fifth straight week, the Los Angeles Rams are head-and-shoulder above the rest of the NFL for 2025 performance metrics. As you’ll see below, my numbers are slightly higher on the Rams than the market, and my unscientific gut doesn’t buy that the Rams are truly in a different category than other top teams with elite quarterbacks, like the Buffalo Bills.

Below the Rams are around 10-15 teams without much separating them this season, though the prospects for the Indianapolis Colts to advance in the playoffs are now severely hampered by the loss of Daniel Jones. The same is now the case for the Kansas City Chiefs without Patrick Mahomes.

UNEXPECTED POINTS VERSUS THE MARKET

** These are Wednesday morning numbers on the betting markets from inpredictable.