2023 Week 1 NFL Power Rankings

Ranking each team by neutral-field expected score differential, incorporating roster changes this offseason

We’re close enough to the season to have the the known knowns and unknown knowns well defined, giving us ability to project what will happen this season. Of course, projections will never again be weaker and less confident than right now, before we have the most predictive evidence flow in during the season.

I’m going to walk through the process of getting to my initial power, which are denominated in the point differentials we expect for every team playing on a neutral field and against a league-average opponent. These numbers represent my best guesses for how relatively strong teams are independent of schedule.

• You can find the archive of power rankings from last season here

• All the detailed information for year-end 2022 power rankings and the initial 2023 rankings are on the subscriber Google sheet (along with other site metrics).

REVIEWING 2022 POWER RANKINGS

Looking back at the fundamentals of how teams played last season, I’ve plotted the projected scoring rates (per play) on offense and defense for every team, which is largely derived from my game-level adjusted scores, decaying older results, and giving roughly 1.5x the weighting to offensive performance versus defensive, with the former being more sticky going forward.

There are no adjusts in the plot for injuries at key positions or anything outside of the actual play on the field.

The Kansas City Chiefs were in a tier of there own on offense last season, a position I had them in for the second half of the season, even when there was more doubt in the media around their ability to win another Super Bowl. The other teams for whom results didn’t match my estimate of fundamental team strength include the Cleveland Browns on the upside, and the Minnesota Vikings on the downside.

The next step in projecting 2023 is incorporating player-level changes for each team. For that, I’m leveraging my Improvement Index for this offseason, which estimates on a points-basis how much each team’s 2023 roster has improved versus what was there at the end of last season.

Unsurprisingly, the New York Jets with a historically strong quarterback upgrade lead the index. Teams who spent tremendous draft capital and real dollars in free agency also benefited mightily, including the Houston Texans and Chicago Bears. On the flip side, the Green Bay Packers and Tampa Bay Buccaneers lost their Hall-of-Fame quarterbacks, and the Philadelphia Eagles were hit hard by player departures in free agency. In the case of the Eagles, their losses were from an extremely high floor, with the highest 2023 projection if every team maintained it’s season-end roster.

The power rankings also adjust for quarterback play if 2023 starters missed a lot of action in 2022 and should return healthy (Matthew Stafford, Lamar Jackson, Ryan Tannehill and Tua Tagovailoa), or if their 2022 efficiency was built on top of unsustainable positive performance. I quantify and adjust for many of those factors in my Adjusted Quarterback Efficiency metric (AQE), illustrated below.