NFL Week 2 Rankings

Deux jaguars du Pérou

Here is your weekly check in on how the betting market ranks the NFL teams. With opening lines available for week 3 NFL games, I can now dispense with the Cantor Gaming lines to fill in the gaps in my regression analysis. The rankings below take the point spreads that Vegas sets for each NFL game and uses them to reverse engineer an implied team ranking. See here and here for more background.

The Jaguars Limbo Under a Low Bar

The Jaguars (somehow) found a way to be even worse than expected. A four point underdog against the Chiefs (at home, no less), and they lose by 26. Prior to their week 1 loss, the Jaguars were a 3 point underdog on the road against the Raiders in week 2. The market has since corrected, and the Jaguars are now a six point underdog, although part of that movement could be due to a perceived better than expected showing by the Raiders against the Colts.

The Jaguars were already ranked the worst team in my week 1 rankings, but their GPF (Generic Points Favored), dropped even further this week, from 7.6 to 8.9. They drop any lower and they rival the post-Manning, pre-Luck, Curtis Painter-led Colts of 2011 in terms of sheer numerical awfulness. An unfortunate start for the Jaguars new, supposedly more analytical, approach.

Here is the Week 2 ranking table. The Broncos remain on top. The two Pennsylvania-based NFL teams were like ships passing in the night, with the Eagles jumping from #18 to #11, and the Steelers sinking from #14 to #24.

Rank	Team	Week 1	GPF
1	DEN	1	7.2
2	SF	3	6.4
3	SEA	2	6.0
4	GB	6	5.5
5	NE	4	4.7
6	NO	5	3.8
7	HOU	9	3.4
8	ATL	7	2.4
9	CHI	8	2.3
10	CIN	11	2.0
11	PHI	18	1.9
12	WAS	16	0.8
13	DET	10	0.5
14	BAL	13	0.1
15	CAR	22	0.1
16	DAL	12	-0.1
17	IND	19	-0.1
18	KC	24	-0.2
19	NYG	15	-0.3
20	MIA	23	-0.4
21	TB	21	-1.5
22	STL	17	-1.8
23	MIN	20	-2.1
24	PIT	14	-2.4
25	TEN	28	-2.7
26	ARI	25	-2.9
27	SD	27	-3.4
28	CLE	26	-3.5
29	NYJ	29	-5.2
30	BUF	30	-5.6
31	OAK	31	-6.0
32	JAC	32	-8.9