Week 4 NFL Power Rankings

The Detroit Lions are moving on up, but the Buffalo Bills are still at the top of the NFL

The Week 4 power rankings combine the initial, Week 1 power rankings I released and the evidence from two 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).

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 going into Week 4, 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.

Yes, that’s the Indianapolis Colts you see in a tier of their own in the top-right section of the plot. Remember, the results for this year only account for roughly 20% of the go-forward projections at this point in the season. That said, the Colts have been incredibly efficient offensively, and pretty good defensively, even when adjusting for opponent and other contextual factors. You’ll see below that the Colts haven’t quite gotten into my top-10 yet, but they aren’t far away.