My Philosophy on Power Rankings

Most sports sites and writers have Power Rankings. Why, because humans love lists and we love to analyze and attach value to sport teams. As a sports writer, I do my Power Report as a pride thing, to show how much I know about sports and evaluate my own predictions and evaluations.

Baseball and basketball have such long seasons that it is pretty easy to tell where a team is after 60 games. The standings tell the story pretty well. There are strength of schedule differences, but pretty much you are what your record shows.

Ranking football teams brings many more challenges. The biggest challenge is that there are 32 teams and everybody only plays 16 games, including 6 against the teams in their division. This often creates some odd scenerios, like the Falcons winning 13, Bears winning 11 and the Chiefs winning 10 last year (how good were they?). It's common for mediocre teams to get lucky with a soft schedule and have a win total greater than their team lineup should grant.

Evaluating the beginning of the season is tough because 2 games in the NFL season equals 20 in baseball.

The third problem is also caused by an unbalanced schedule. Take the Giants and Falcons for example. I (and most NFL fans outside of New York) believe that the Falcons are a much stronger team than my GMen. The first half of the Giants schedule has @ Redskins, Rams, @ Cardinals, Seahawks, Bills, Dolphins. It is not hard to believe that they could start 6-1 (or 5-2), which would put their record among the best in the NFL, despite only playing one quality team (Eagles). The Falcons begin the season by playing @ Bears, Eagles, @ Bucs, Packers, @ Lions and Saints. That is 6 tough games before Week 8. But in the second half of the season the Giants have the toughest schedule in the NFL and the Falcons’ lightens up a little. So will we be forced to put the Giants ahead of the Falcons because their record is better through 7 games? By Week 15 the standings will be a good indicator of where teams are but before then there could be some flukes or misleading teams (like the 2-0 Bills and the 2009 Broncos that started 6-0). So before then, we have to do our best to analyze the sleeping giants that will break out and disregard the mediocre teams that take advantage of a soft schedule early.

My basic criteria for determining my Power Report rankings are thus:
1) The Eye Test: what do my eyes tell me?
2) Obviously wins and losses are important in evaluating the strength of each team
3) If two teams matched up on a neutral field, who do I believe is likely to win the majority of the time? (Team A could beat Team B 9 out of 10 times in hypothetical games, but if that #10 happens first, it doesn’t necessarily mean that Team B is better. Look at the Titans and Ravens).
4) Where do I expect this team to be at the end of the season? What teams have the most staying power (opposed to the baseball Pirates that started hot but then fell apart, or the afore-mentioned 2009 Broncos)?
5) Along with #4, how good are they? If they are a 12-13 win caliber team, that means they are expected to lose 3-4 games. It doesn’t matter if those happen in Week 1, 3, or 15. The Saints played the Packers (reigning champs and favored to win this year) their first game. Am I going to rank them below the Redskins, Bills, Jets, and Lions because they lost on the road to the best team in the NFL, and those other teams played some vanilla opponents? It’s only been 2 games!
6) Upsets happen. If a team gets bit twice, it’s a sign.

I believe that power rankings should be pretty consistent week to week. Remember in the beginning of this silly article where I said that I like to do power rankings to evaluate my own evaluating skills? If Team X begins the season at #29, and after each game moves to #15, #3, #19, #5, then what do I know? Nothing, I’m just bouncing around overreacting to every game, floating on every wind of doctrine. But if the majority of my rankings stay pretty close from Week 1 through Week 17 then it shows my initial evaluations were pretty good! I stuck with my guns and didn’t cave in after a couple tough losses and I wasn’t fooled by a flukey start. (Of course, if a favorite team of mine begins 3-6 I’m not going to blindly leave them higher than they belong. And injuries can force significant adjustments.)

Yes, that is subjective. No, it's not an exact science. And that’s the fun in doing power rankings. Coming up with some magic formula is missing the trees for the forest.

That being said, in my Power Report you may notice a few points:
1) I’m not buying the Jets or Bills despite their 2-0 start.
2) I’m not too down on the Saints, Ravens, Chargers or Eagles just because they lost a game.
3) I am buying the Lions and Texans. Like I said, they pass the Eye Test. They look good. The Texans could lose to the Saints but I’m not worried overall.
4) We don’t quite know enough about the Falcons, Bucs, Raiders, Redskins, Dolphins or Cardinals to really feel good about their position in the rankings.
5) Top 10 teams that I am least confident about: Bears and Eagles and Steelers. It goes without saying that if Big Ben misses several games the Steelers will be average, if Cutler goes down for a while the Bears are below-average, and should Vick miss a few games the Eagles may drop. The offensive lines for each are poor.

I’m a little bullish on the Lions. The Lions might not be the #6 best team, but if they end the year in the top 12 I’ll feel good about my evaluation.

I have had nothing nice to say about the Bills to this point so I will now. They look much better than I anticipated. They have more dimensions in their offense, and Ryan Fitzpatrick is a quality player (I liked him last year, too). There just hasn't been enough evidence to show that they will continue and win 7-8 games.

And by the way, I'm not afraid to admit that I was wrong!