NEW! HawkBlogger NFL Power Rankings Week 3

I’m very excited to announce a new addition to the blog. I believe I have a pretty good formula for ranking each team. It is based on my belief that offensive and defensive efficiency are the best predictor of a team’s combined strength.

To that end, the stats I rely on to determine that efficiency are Yards/Attempt in passing and Yards/Carry in rushing. I look at these for both the offense and the defense. My basic theory is that if you add together the YPA and YPC of a team’s offense and subtract the combined value of the defenses YPA and YPC, you have a pretty good idea of how a team is performing.

I wanted to add red zone efficiency into the mix as well (another key indicator on offense and defense in my opinion), but I couldn’t find a source for that info on the web. *Please let me know if you know where I can find this info. (UPDATE: I got this info, but chose not to include it this season)

Efficiency is a key measure, but the game is really decided by points. There are lots of intangibles that can’t be measured that add up to points either scored or prevented. Is a team really a bend, but don’t break defense? Is a team great between the 20s, but scoring a bunch of field goals? All that should show up in points scored and points allowed, so I’ve added avg pts/game scored and allowed to the formula.

That gives us:

(YPC (offense) + YPA (offense) + Avg Pts/Game Scored) – (YPC (defense) + YPA (defense)+ Avg Pts/Game Allowed)

I’m pretty happy with the results (they don’t include the Saints/Titans game), but I’d love to hear your reactions.

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Here is the Excel version for folks that would like to get more power over sorting and detail. It includes each teams YPC and YPA info.