Is There A New Best Team in The NFL?
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With schedule imbalances early in the season, it can be difficult to determine the best team in the league purely by record. 538’s ELO system used to be a reliable source for NFL team comparisons, controlling for the difficulty of opponent.
However, since 538 has stopped publishing sports rankings and predictions, I thought it would be a good time to run a two-year rolling ELO to rank all the NFL teams with 1000 as the starting point. Here’s how it turned out.
Figure 1 shows the ELO score versus the NFL week number, starting from Week 1 last season (23 being the Superbowl), and up to Week 8 this season.
Figure 1: Two-year rolling ELO scores of 32 NFL teams; the x-axis is the NFL week starting from week 1 last year (23 being the Superbowl) and ending at Week 8 this year; the y-axis is the ELO score.
The Eagles passed the Chiefs last weekend, in Week 8, and now are atop the NFL ELO rankings. This is the first time that the Eagles are atop the rankings since Week 16 last year. This is also the first time that the Chiefs don’t have at least a share of the top spot since their playoff win over the Jaguars in the AFC Divisional Round last year.
After Week 5, the Chiefs, Eagles, and 49ers were at a virtual tie for first, but three consecutive losses sent the 49ers on their biggest skid in two years and the Chiefs’ loss to the Broncos has sent them on a nosedive as well. Despite having the highest ELO rating today, the Eagles are still quite a bit below the Chiefs’ peak after Week 7 and a bit below their own peak and the 49ers peak after Week 5.
Now let’s take a look at the teams with the most improvement so far this year.
The Dolphins are atop the list of most improved teams in 2023, followed by two other AFC teams - the Jaguars and Ravens.
The Lions are the most improved NFC team and the Jets, Eagles, Seahawks, Browns, and Cowboys round out the list of teams that have improved significantly so far in 2023.
Three NFC squads - the Panthers, Packers, and Giants - have seen the largest decline in ELO. The Patriots are the AFC team with the biggest drop off and the Cardinals and Commanders round out the list of significant decliners.
Table 1: 32 NFL teams ranked by ELO improvement in 2023.
Here’s a ranking of all 32 teams, along with the ELO scores.
Table 2: 32 NFL teams ranked by ELO scores after Week 8
Breaking down Super Bowl contenders into tiers we have:
Tier 1: Eagles and Chiefs
Tier 2: 49ers, Bengals, and Bills
Tier 3: Cowboys, Jaguars, and Lions
Of these nine contenders, five are in the AFC and four in the NFC.
