Week 6 NFL Power Rankings

Surprisingly little movement at the top of the rankings, despite many of those teams suffering loses in Week 5

The Week 6 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 65/35 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 6, 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.

Looking strictly at SOS adjusted 2025 performance, the Indianapolis Colts stay in a tier of their own after another dominating win in Week 5. The scoreboard point differential was a bit wider than that reflected in my adjusted scores, but a solid win against fairly poor competition either way. The Colts’ 2025 schedule doesn’t have much in the way of truly testing them against top competition, with the Kansas City Chiefs the only remaining opponent currently in the second tier; the Colts already lost to the Los Angeles Rams, a second-tier team.

Speaking of the second tier, it also hasn’t shifted from the prior week, though the gap with the third tier has narrowed. The Detroit Lions separated from the Chiefs, Rams and Buffalo Bills as the only winner in Week 5, but as you’ll see below, the betting markets aren’t as sold on their strength as my numbers. I guess you can’t fault markets for refusing to fully buy in on Jared Goff.

The third tier is mashed up with lots of teams, most noticeably including the 4-1 Jacksonville Jaguars, San Francisco 49ers and Tampa Bay Buccaneers. I’m not ruling any of them out at this point in the season as ever becoming legitimate title contenders. Yet my numbers don’t see their 2025 performances as materially better than those of the 2-2 Dallas Cowboys and Atlanta Falcons.

I expected that the biggest complaints about my rankings this week will come from Jaguars fans, so they’ll be my deeper dive of the week. Starting with the most recent results in Week 5, their victory over the Chiefs looked much better than the fundamentals indicated, with the adjusted scores seeing the Chiefs as 10 points better, perhaps the biggest swings I’ve ever seen.

The Jaguars offense is currently 16th in EPA per play, 14th in success rate and 16th in yards per play. The defense has faired a bit better at 6th, 16th and 10th, respectively. With an emphasis on the predictiveness of success rate versus higher variance metrics, the Jaguars appear roughly average both offensively and defensively. The defensive EPA figure includes a single play that netted 12.7 expected points (Patrick Mahomes pick-6), somewhat skewing that metric.

My numbers aren’t building in much of a quarterback boost for Trevor Lawrence, as his generational prospect status and admitted talent doesn’t add any juice in the model beyond his mediocre NFL performance. Lawrence’s EPA per play has been in a tight range for 2023, 2024 and 2025 (between 0.06-0.09), putting him the bottom-half of NFL quarterbacks each season. My adjusted quarterback efficiency numbers have boosted him in the past, but the effect of adjustments has been immaterial this season.

The Jaguars face the Seattle Seahawks and Rams the next two weeks, and their fundamentals-based metrics in those contests will go a long way to telling us who they really are this season.

UNEXPECTED POINTS VERSUS THE MARKET

** These are Tuesday morning numbers on the betting markets from inpredictable, which often firm up during the week.

** Ravens power ranking assumes Lamar Jackson is out