Power Rankings (Week 7)

To test my rankings, I went back to old seasons (2004 through 2009) and calculated a final regular season power ranking.  Next, I compared how these final rankings compared to playoff performance: if someone ranked higher than another team (and subsequently beat them) then hey, a plus; if a lower ranked team beat a higher ranked one, a minus.  Then finally, I tweaked through a whole range of coefficients on the Scoring Efficiency, Yardage Efficiency, and Margin of Victory.  Basically, I tried to find which coefficients best predicted playoff performance.

Fortunately, the behavior was really weird.  For three of the seasons I looked at, Scoring Efficiency was the only value that mattered.  If I set all the other items to zero (and used only Scoring Efficiency), then I best predicted the post-season.  So for this week's power rankings, I used this equation for the win rating:

Win Rating = exp(-1/(3* Scoring Efficiency ))

Thus, the only thing I'm using to rate a team is how they score; if it takes them a few yards to score points, that's good, if it takes alot, it's bad.  It's interesting; bad teams have drives that stall, turnovers, etc.  Good teams score on every drive, and force turnovers.  I'm going to explore what this means in the next couple of weeks, we'll see how it goes. 

And here's this week's power rankings:

Team	Power Ranking
New York Jets	1.000
Pittsburgh Steelers	0.978
New England Patriots	0.900
Baltimore Ravens	0.885
Houston Texans	0.797
Indianapolis Colts	0.797
Tennessee Titans	0.792
Atlanta Falcons	0.792
Philadelphia Eagles	0.767
Seattle Seahawks	0.730
New York Giants	0.725
Green Bay Packers	0.716
Chicago Bears	0.708
Denver Broncos	0.707
St. Louis Rams	0.701
Jacksonville Jaguars	0.695
Arizona Cardinals	0.695
Washington Redskins	0.683
Kansas City Chiefs	0.681
Miami Dolphins	0.645
Minnesota Vikings	0.624
Tampa Bay Buccaneers	0.608
New Orleans Saints	0.594
Cincinnati Bengals	0.578
Cleveland Browns	0.573
San Diego Chargers	0.572
Detroit Lions	0.550
Oakland Raiders	0.544
Dallas Cowboys	0.522
San Francisco 49ers	0.456
Buffalo Bills	0.412
Carolina Panthers	0.388

J-E-T-S baby.  But actually, the Jets, Ravens, Steelers, and Patriots are all pretty equal.  Let them slug it out.