The Week 4 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 25/75 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 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.
The San Francisco 49ers have an offense operating on a different level, though I’ll acknowledge that my opponent adjustments might not be lowering their efficiency enough in this model. The 49ers lead the NFL by a significant margin in EPA per play (+0.33, Bills second at +0.22), yards per play (7.1, Ravens second at 6.5) and dropback EPA efficiency (+0.62, Cowboys second at +0.34). Of course the likely outcome is that the baseline 49ers offense will regress a bit, while the opponent adjustments knock them down marginally more. Even so, they deserve to be viewed as a top-5 team in the NFL, and it should come as no big surprise if they end the season at the top.
While the offenses for the Seattle Seahawks and Jacksonville Jaguars aren’t in the top-5, their defenses have been impressive enough to put them next in terms of overall 2026 performance. The Seahawks lost to the Washington Commanders last week, but my adjusted scores had them as the significantly better team, holding the Commanders offense to only a 32% success rate, but losing the game on massively negative turnovers. Remember when viewing the power rankings below, that my method views their Week 3 result like a double-digit win on the road, not the actual two-point loss.
The Chicago Bears have been one of the best offenses in the NFL, and they kept going against what was last season a stronger Eagles defense, despite not having their starting quarterback Caleb Williams. My rankings below assume Williams will miss another game, even so I’m higher than the betting markets on their ability to keep performing well with Case Keenum at the helm.
The worst winning team by my numbers this season has been the Cleveland Browns, who sit at 2-1 despite well below average numbers. You’ll see below that my team strength number for the Browns is only slightly lower than the betting market’s, so there appears to be agreement that they’ve been lucky so far this season.
UNEXPECTED POINTS VERSUS THE MARKET
** You can find the numbers on the betting markets from inpredictable here, which often firm up during the week.
