ptdotme’s NFL Elo Power Rankings After Week 11

(By popular demand, see the rankings without the influence of last year’s season-ending ratings in my comment below, or here.)

For this week, the model has been tweaked to slightly increase the value of wins and slightly decrease the importance of margin of victory. As always, this change was only implemented because it increased the accuracy of the model. Again, this was only a slight change so you won’t see a big change in the power rankings – teams went up or down a few Elo rating points and a few pairs of similarly-rated teams swapped rankings.

This is OC. I’ve written code to calculate NFL team Elo ratings^1 on a week to week basis. The goal is to use simple Elo ratings to create power rankings without the influence of human bias and emotion. The ratings are based on each team’s rating from the previous week, with a “parity reset” applied every offseason. The model has been tested for accuracy against game outcomes since week 1 of the 2012^2 season. The ratings are derived only from each game’s score, venue, and date. There are a number of variables/weights in my secret sauce but otherwise they’re fairly conservative, basic, Elo ratings.

This is all a work in progress and feedback is appreciated! See more stats and info on my 2023 NFL Elo Power Rankings page.

Note: You may feel teams are ranked too high or low based on recent games, and you may be right. However, the model has been tested and is more accurate when it doesn’t overreact to individual games. The goal is model accuracy, not rankings that “look right.” ^(2)  

The top 4 teams won handily. The Ravens’ Elo rating got a boost from a big win after Burrow went down, and the Bengals have nearly fallen out of the top 10. The Eagles were slight Elo underdogs at the Chiefs, and picked up a couple Elo points from their win last night. The Browns beat a weaker Steelers team by a smaller than expected margin, and thus lost an Elo rating point and didn’t return to the top 10. The Jaguars had a nice win and skipped over a few closely bunched teams to get back into the top 10.

The Buccs, Steelers, Broncos, and Texans are all rated nearly the same, so their ordering from 17th-20th isn’t meaningful.

The Broncos are on a league-leading 4-game, +33 Elo hot streak (the Raiders, Bears, and Steelers are on 3-game Elo hot streaks). The Jets are on a 4-game -29 Elo cold streak (the Titans, Panthers, Seahawks, and Patriots are on 3-game cold streak).

^(1)See Wikipedia. Elo ratings are numeric and assigned to each contestant. The ratings are used to estimate performance. After each game, the difference between a contestant’s estimated and actual performance is used to update their rating. For the NFL, this can all be summarized as "Who did you beat/lose to and by how much? And who have they beaten/lost to and by how much? And who have they beaten/lost to …

^(2)Moving backward through the years, each preceding season has a much smaller impact on the current ratings. Team ratings from 2010 have zero impact on today’s ratings. Ratings from only a couple years ago, say 2021, have almost no effect on today’s ratings. Seasons going back to 2010 are only used by the model to ensure its accuracy over thousands of NFL games.