For those who celebrate, happy post-Halloween. Hopefully, like me, you got to dress up as a Disney character against your will and eat peanut butter cups for dinner. The idea of putting on a facade, or a mask, is an interesting one at this time of year, where we’re left to wonder which of the teams who have good records are good and which of them will make the playoffs, chests puffed, only to get chopped down to size when the real contenders get involved. Sort of like me in a Kristoff outfit (from
Specifically, you wonder whether some of the teams who have good records are just on the very outer reaches of their best-case scenario and some of the teams who have horrible records are just buried beneath the wonkiness of this season.
The analytic sports experts Ben Baldwin and Mike Beuoy release each Monday a list of market-derived team tiers. Basically, it’s a chart that shows how favored a team would be on a neutral field against a league-average opponent. Obviously, the Bills are way out ahead at +10.6 points, while the Texans are a league-worst -8.1.
The list pegs the Seahawks, Giants and Jets (all teams with solid winning records) as below average. They also see the Vikings as just okay, and the Patriots as better than we currently imagine. The Raiders are, essentially, the definition of a league-average opponent right now. The list is one way of looking at the league and making sense of what we’ve seen so far, keeping us from leaning too hard into an irresponsible overreaction.
In this world, there are plenty of costumed teams, and also a few that just decided not to dress up for the first half of the season, leaving us to think they are not as good as they actually are. The Power Rankings are supposed to be a good way of charting as much over the course of a season.
Let’s see what we come up with:
