The Eagles Are 2-0 And Ranked 16th — What The Power Rankings Say That The Standings Don't
Win-loss record and our power rankings agree on a lot of teams. On a handful of others, they're telling two completely different stories. Here's where the gap is biggest, and why it's there.
Philadelphia is undefeated and sitting below .500 teams
The Eagles are 2-0. They're ranked 16th, with a rating of -0.7 — worse than seven teams with a losing or .500 record, including one team that's still winless. Their offensive numbers are unremarkable (+0.052 EPA per play, 13th in the league) and their defense has actually allowed more value than it's created. Two wins is two wins, but the underlying number says this is a below-average team that hasn't lost yet, not a top-10 one.
Two teams are rated top-6 with .500 records
The Ravens (2nd, +14.3) and the Jets (5th, +12.1) are both sitting at 1-1, and both are rated ahead of six different 2-0 teams. That's the flip side of the Eagles story — a game or two of bad luck or a tough bounce can leave a genuinely elite team with a mediocre record, and the win-loss column won't tell you which is which. If either of these teams is available at a discount because bettors are anchoring to their record, the rating says that discount isn't earned.
Washington is winless and still outranks six teams with a win
The Commanders are 0-2, which usually means a team near the bottom of any ranking. Instead they sit 20th, ahead of the Texans, Steelers, Titans, Buccaneers, Falcons and Chargers — all of whom have at least one win. An 0-2 start looks the same in the standings whether a team has been getting outplayed or just losing close, competitive games, and the rating is what tells those two apart.
The league actually breaks into four groups, not one long list
A tier of one. San Francisco, at +16.0, is by itself. Nobody else is within two points.
A crowded second tier. Eight teams — Ravens, Bills, Seahawks, Jets, Chiefs, Bengals, Raiders, Jaguars — are packed between +9.2 and +14.3. Any of them could plausibly be considered the 2nd-best team in football right now, and any of them could drop to 9th with one bad week.
A wide, murky middle. Fourteen teams sit between +5.8 and -6.8 — everyone from the Rams down through the Giants. This is where most of the league actually lives, and it's the group where win-loss record is the least reliable signal, since these teams are close enough in quality that turnovers and injuries are deciding most of the games.
A clear bottom, with one team by itself at the very floor. Six teams are winless, and five of them occupy the bottom five slots. Indianapolis sits alone at -20.0, five points worse than the next-worst team — not a crowded last place, an actual outlier.
How teams are building their number: offense-carried vs. defense-carried
Not every good rating comes from the same place, and it matters which half of the equation is doing the work.
Purely offense-carried: San Francisco's entire +16.0 rating is offense (+0.382 EPA/play, the best mark in the league) paired with a defense that's barely above average. Buffalo (3rd) is the same shape — an excellent offense (+0.343) carrying a defense that's actually been below average so far.
Purely defense-carried: The Jets (5th) and Seahawks (4th) are the inverse — both have offenses producing modest value (+0.055 and +0.066) while their defenses (-0.219 and -0.173) are doing almost all of the heavy lifting.
Good offense, bad defense, cancels out: Dallas has the fifth-best offensive rate in the league (+0.200 EPA/play) and it barely shows up in their overall ranking (18th, -3.6) because their defense has been one of the worst (+0.216 EPA/play allowed, 4th-worst). If that defense turns even average, Dallas has the offensive foundation to jump a dozen spots.
Rest-of-season difficulty is already lopsided
Two teams stand out on the schedule side of the ledger, independent of how they've played so far. The Chargers have the single hardest remaining schedule in the league, which is bad news layered on top of an already-poor rating. Houston has the easiest remaining schedule in football — worth remembering the next time their current ranking (25th) gets treated as fixed.
The bottom line
Records and ratings mostly rhyme, but where they don't — Philadelphia's unearned 2-0, Baltimore and the Jets' underpriced .500 records, Washington's misleadingly bad 0-2 — is exactly where there's real information the standings alone won't give you. The middle of the league is fifteen teams deep and genuinely hard to separate; the top and bottom are each defined by one clear outlier.