NFL 2015 TABRankings: Week 10

As Monday’s Week 10 recap already established, there are a lot of 4-5 teams. In fact, there are 11 such teams, creating a flood of mediocrity around the league. However, as Monday’s recap also established, not all of these 4-5 teams are made alike. In all three cases of study, we saw the Kansas City Chiefs stand out as better than your average 4-5 team.

So with more than a third of the league owning the same record, and some of these teams being clearly better than the others in the subset, what is the TABRankings range for these teams. Just to warn you, the answer is going to shock you.

Before you scroll down, let’s consider more context from Week 10. Besides the realization of all these 4-5 teams, we also had a flood of upsets during the week. The TABRankings actually fared better than the expert consensus (and us) with a 6-8 record for the favorites in Week 10. However, the favorites that lost opened up the bridge that once separated the top six teams from the rest of the league.

Cincinnati’s loss to Houston (2nd v. 22nd in the Week 9 TABR) made for surprisingly little chance, with a combined four-rank change for the two teams today. That’s because the other five 3-5 teams won last week, making it hard for the Texans to move up. The much, much more notable losses were the home divisional defeats suffered by the Broncos (4th) and Packers (5th) to the Chiefs (17th) and Lions (32nd), respectively. The affect of these outcomes can be seen below.

What you’ll see is this: a perfect storm for one 4-5 team. The Broncos and Packers were sacked by their losses, while the Cardinals were sacked by the now-stronger opponent adjustment. Combine that with the continuing mediocrity in the league, and suddenly we have a sub-.500 team in our top four. No kidding. At least you can probably figure out who it is if you did Monday’s reading (and read this opening commentary as well). We checked it once. We checked it twice. Heck, we even checked it thrice. Make no mistake about it: our numbers currently spit out totals that put the Kansas City Chiefs into the league’s top four teams.

Perhaps we now have the biggest indictment on the league’s mediocrity issue.

For those who are new to the TABRankings, this is a system created long ago (and continue to tweak on almost a yearly basis) to look at the quality of play by a team. This is expected to go beyond each team’s overall record, although the standings matter a whole lot to the rankings formula. Other key factors, including outcome-based stats and efficiency stats, play a role in the formula as well. These rankings will then be used to help categorize (and even predict) games for the weekly Pick’em competition.

Here’s our formula:

The TABRankings formula:
(Win Pct x 2)+(Pyth Pct)+(Div Pct x 0.5)+(Qual Pct x 0.5)+(3rd/4th Down Diff x 1.75)+(TO Margin x 4)-(FK Diff x 0.75)+(Sack Diff x 0.75)+(Time Ahead Avg x 1.2)+(Time Ahead Big Avg x 1.5)+(Real Quarterback Rating Diff x 1.25)+(Relative Pts Avg x 1.8)

The 2015 totals from the above formula make up the Raw TABR, which make up the core factor of the rankings. Add in the Opponent Adjustment, based on strength of schedule, and this will create the True TABR for Week 10.

The TABRankings opponent adjustment formula:
[(Gross Opponent TABR / Games Played) – League Average TABR] * X
NOTE: The multiple X will be determined as the variable that fits the equation: (1/6) * TABR IQR = X * Adjustment IQR.
For this week, the multiple was determined to be 0.8.

With now all that put together, the results for Week 10 are available below. Make sure to check back each week for the newest installment of the TABRankings. We will be publishing these results weekly to see how each team progresses!

The TABRankings top eight:
1, 2, 3, 4
5, 6, 7, 8

True TABRankings — Week 10