NFL Week 1 Rankings

So these are a bit late, but here are the Week 1 NFL betting market rankings. These rankings are an attempt to reverse engineer what Vegas "thinks" by looking at the point spreads that they set for each game. It's basically a ranking based on the wisdom of crowds (or, more specifically, a crowd with money). My methodology page has a simple example and you can also go here for my first attempt at creating these.

I took a first look at the 2013 rankings in early August, using the point spreads for weeks 1-16 as published by Cantor Gaming. With real money now on the first two weeks of the season, I can take an updated look (I still need the Cantor rankings for weeks 3-16 to fill in some gaps, but they are given very little weight). I'll publish these each week up to week 3, when I'll then transition to the more detailed, daily version of the rankings (plus sparklines and bar graphs and whatever else I can think of to clutter up the page).

Week 1 NFL Rankings

The ranking table is below. GPF stands for "Generic Points Favored". It is what you would expect a team to be favored by against a league average opponent on a neutral field (add 2.5 points for home field advantage). For comparison, I also listed my original 2013 rankings based on the Cantor Gaming point spreads.

The rankings now have a bit more spread to them. The Cantor lines seemed a bit compressed, compared to how these rankings normally run. The top 4 are unchanged. The Lions, Saints, and Bears had the most movement upwards. The Jets, Bills, and Chargers had the most significant movement downwards.

			Cantor
Rank	Team	GPF	Rank	GPF
1	DEN	6.0	1	4.6
2	SEA	5.5	2	4.5
3	SF	5.5	3	4.4
4	NE	4.8	4	4.3
5	NO	4.1	8	2.1
6	GB	3.9	5	3.1
7	ATL	3.2	6	2.5
8	CHI	2.6	11	1.1
9	HOU	2.5	10	1.5
10	DET	2.4	17	0.2
11	CIN	1.7	13	1.0
12	DAL	1.2	16	0.4
13	BAL	1.1	7	2.2
14	PIT	0.8	9	1.7
15	NYG	0.3	12	1.0
16	WAS	0.3	14	0.9
17	STL	-0.2	24	-1.5
18	PHI	-0.3	21	-1.0
19	IND	-0.4	23	-1.3
20	MIN	-0.5	15	0.4
21	TB	-0.5	20	-0.9
22	CAR	-0.9	18	-0.3
23	MIA	-1.1	19	-0.5
24	KC	-1.5	26	-2.2
25	ARI	-2.6	29	-3.6
26	CLE	-2.7	28	-3.1
27	SD	-3.9	22	-1.1
28	TEN	-4.1	30	-4.2
29	NYJ	-5.6	25	-1.9
30	BUF	-6.8	27	-3.0
31	OAK	-7.3	31	-5.0
32	JAC	-7.6	32	-6.1