The Week 3 power rankings combine the initial, Week 1 power rankings I released and the evidence from the first two weeks of NFL football. The key in updating the rankings is knowing when to not overreact and when to be aggressively moving assumptions. Right now, the rankings incorporate roughly a 15/85 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 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 2026 performance going into Week 3, 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.
The San Francisco 49ers jump to the top for 2026 performance, although they, perhaps, don’t deserve full credit for destroying the Miami Dolphins. The power rankings see the Dolphins as (spoiler alert) the worst team in the NFL, yet they could be even worse than the model can currently imagine. You can see on the plot how they are in their own tier of defensive awfulness, which the 49ers took advantage of to a high degree.
The Baltimore Ravens are in a superficially weird position after losing to the New Orleans Saints, yet they were an awesome team for basically 6.5 quarters this year. The Saints might not be a bad team, with a very close loss to the Lions and this win over the Ravens.
The Carolina Panthers are in the thick of playoff contenders, while the New York Jets look fantastic defensively, at least so far.
My numbers have been haters of the Philadelphia Eagles for quite a long time now, and the model hasn’t been impressed by their close victories over the Commanders and Titans.
UNEXPECTED POINTS VERSUS THE MARKET
** These numbers haven’t yet been updated for Tuesday morning. You can find the numbers on the betting markets from inpredictable here, which often firm up during the week and could be updated soon after publication.
