Week 9 NFL Power Rankings

The Chiefs are on top, the Colts continue to rise, and I'm still (a little) low on the Eagles

The Week 9 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 80/20 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 9, 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.

If you’ve been betting that the Indianapolis Colts were going to come back down to earth, you’ve lost a lot of money the last few weeks. Not only are the Colts continuing to play as well as the elite teams of the NFL, they’ve slightly extended the distance between themselves and the rest of the pack. The Colts are really in their own tier for 2025 performance, admittedly having faced a relatively easy schedule - 30th in difficulty by my numbers. You can only play whoever is lined up in front of you, and the Colts have done that as well as anyone. Going forward, they have a top-3 schedule in difficulty, meaning the W-L results could get worse, even if their play stays strong.

The rest of the NFL elite has stayed relatively stable, with the Kansas City Chiefs rolling, the Buffalo Bills bouncing back, the Green Bay Packers dominating on Sunday Night Football, and bye weeks for the Detroit Lions and Los Angeles Rams.

I’d put them in a different tier from the teams above, but the 2025 performances of the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots don’t look that much different from the pack of Super Bowl contenders above them. Both teams have had top-10 offenses and above-average defenses. What a difference a quarterback can make, or in the case of the Patriots, a second-year leap.

The engagement on my power rankings tweets dropped precipitously last week, with reality in the form of W-L records mostly aligning with my previous assessments of team strength. I’d guess Philadelphia Eagles fans will go back to being mad at me after a couple weeks for strong offensive performances, and having beaten some teams still above them in my rankings.

As you’ll see below, I’m aligned with the betting markets in terms of the Eagles’ strength versus the average NFL team, but higher than markets on some of their competition. Even after a couple strong games, the Eagles are around average in offensive and defensive EPA efficiencies this season. My numbers give more weight to recent performances, but there isn’t an extreme discount of prior struggles under the assumption that teams have “turned the corner” or “righted the ship”.

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 has a roughly 50/50 chance Lamar Jackson is back