Week 18 NFL Power Rankings
The Patriots are on the rise, with Week 18 starting quarterback chaos making the ranking mostly tentative
The Week 18 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 18, 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.
While the larger landscape across the NFL didn’t change a ton, there were a few material movements based on Week 17 performances. The Los Angeles Rams came back to the crowd a bit, but not much as they were seen as the better team by adjusted scores, even though they lost the game. The other big move near the top is the New England Patriots separating from the rest of the non-Ram top-tier. While their opponent last week was bad, you can’t argue the Patriots should have done more than average over an expected point per dropback.
The other movements in that tier are the Indianapolis Colts and Kansas City Chiefs continuing to fall without there starting quarterbacks, and the Detroit Lions weakening on the back of multiple poor performances, especially for their defense and running attacks.
The only team that’s already in the playoffs but doesn’t make the top couple tier of the graph above is the Los Angeles Chargers. My numbers have been down on the Chargers all year, with their offensive performing at a substandard level, despite having Justin Herbert. The Chargers rank 20th in offensive EPA per play this year, 17th dropping back to pass and 22nd on designed runs. You can make the argument that Herbert has been better than his numbers, though my EPA adjustments don’t give him extra credit over his mediocre baseline numbers.
UNEXPECTED POINTS VERSUS THE MARKET
** I’m skipping this section as the market is all over the place this week, with so much quarterback uncertainty
