2024 Initial NFL Power Rankings

Ranking each team by neutral-field expected score differential, incorporating prior-season data, injury luck and roster changes this offseason

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

I’m going to walk through the process of getting to my initial power rankings, 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 2023 power rankings and the initial 2024 rankings are on the subscriber Google sheet (along with other site metrics).

REVIEWING 2023 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 adjustments in the plot for injuries at key positions or anything outside of what happened on the actual play on the field.

Despite the loss in the Super Bowl, the San Francisco 49ers still came out as the likely best team last year, according to how they performed on the field. The 49ers had a substantial lead over the Kansas City Chiefs going into the final game of the year, with the latter uncharacteristically struggling offensively during long stretches of the regular season, before catching fire in the playoffs. It’s fair to raise the Chiefs a bit from these numbers based on their longer track record with Patrick Mahomes at the helm. Yet, an overtime loss in a game where the highest variance plays broke against them, shouldn’t discount our perception of how good the 49ers were last year.

The non-49ers, second tier of performance in 2023 is comprised of the Chiefs, Baltimore Ravens, Buffalo Bills and Detroit Lions. My numbers were high on the Bills throughout the 2023 season, even when things were looking very dark in terms of record and many media analysts dropped them out of the top-10. Simply put: the offense was never an issue last year, making the firing of Ken Dorsey nonsensical. The Ravens’ offense was never quite as good as many thought, but their defense was elite. The Lions combined an average-ish defense with a top-4 offense, with the results of the latter unit being significantly more predictive going forward.

The Miami Dolphins, Dallas Cowboys, Green Bay Packers and Los Angeles Rams round out the groups of near-elite teams from last year. All in good position to potentially make offseason roster moves that put them into the discussion for a 2024 Super Bowl.

ADJUSTMENTS FOR THE NEW NFL SEASON

IMPROVEMENT INDEX

The next step in projecting 2024 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 current roster has improved versus what it was at the end of last season.

The power rankings also adjust for quarterback play if 2024 starters missed a lot of action in 2023 and should return healthy, but that’s a separate process. The Falcons show the most improvement mostly due to the addition of Kirk Cousins as a substantial upgrade over the combination of quarterbacks they trotted out in 2023. The Chicago Bears added a ton of talent via the draft, who will have even greater impact beyond this season - the plot only is looking at 2024 effects.

On the offseason downside are the Baltimore Ravens, after losing a number of starters in free agency, that mostly weren’t offset by signings. Theoretically, the Ravens have players to set in as starters for those who were lost, but it’s not always that simple, especially without compromising depth. The Philadelphia Eagles were a negative outlier in the 2023 Improvement Index, and you could argue their lack of depth caught up with them during a round second half of the season.

QUARTERBACK LUCK (OF LACK THEREOF)

I quantify and adjust for many of those factors in my Adjusted Quarterback Efficiency metric (AQE), illustrated below.

I don’t fully adjust go-forward projections for everything in AQE, as much of the scheme and receiver situations will maintain going forward. However, more high-variance aspects of play, like turnover luck and drops, can be assumed to mostly regress to expectations.

All quarterback results are part of the power rankings adjustments, but the plot above looks at only those quarterbacks with 400-plus dropbacks (or the most for their team). Most quarterbacks

INJURIES: ADJUSTED GAMES LOST

The last element I’m adjusting the pure, on-field numbers from last season for is injuries. I make specific adjustments for veteran quarterback injuries that held down offensive results for teams last year, notably for the New York Jets, New York Giants, Cincinnati Bengals, and Arizona Cardinals, among others. Outside of the quarterback positions, I’m leveraging the Adjusted Games Lost at FTN (brought over by Aaron Schatz, formerly of Football Outsiders) to measure the impacts of injuries last season to every team's offense and defense units.

The Houston Texans suffered the worst injury luck last season, particularly on offense. On the offensive line, the Texans lost nearly double the games to injury than any other team (82.1, with the Jets second at 46.1). They were also in the top-5 games lost at wide receiver, the second most impactful position group on offense, not including quarterback. The New England Patriots and Carolina Panthers are in the second tier for worst injury luck, both in the top-5 for games lost at edge rusher and defensive back, the most important defense position groups.

The plot above treats all positional injuries on the same scale, but my adjustments give more weighting to higher positional value units (OL, WR, DB, ED) than the rest.

2024 INITIAL POWER RANKINGS