This season is making a mockery of power rankings.
There are no dominant teams, and no clearly defined tiers of contenders and pretenders. Nearly all of the 32 teams are some shade of average, meaning the #9 team in our rankings is maybe a hair better than the #19 team.
NONETHELESS, we saw a big shake-up in the rankings this week, with three of the top-five teams falling flat, and chaos taking over at the fringes of the playoff picture.
Click here to see the rankings >
Once again, here's how we came up with them.
We took our rankings from last week and moved teams up and down based on the following criteria:
- A win: up 2 spots
- A loss: down 1 spot
- A loss by 10+ points: down 2 spots
- A win against a top-5 team from the week before: up 2 spots
- A win against a top-12 team from the week before (aka, a playoff team): up 1 spot
- Covering the point spread: up 1 spot
- A one-loss record: up 2 spots
- A one-win record: down 2 spots
1. Atlanta Falcons (#1 last week): Beat the Raiders
Record: 6-0
Biggest thing we learned this week: Matt Ryan is human. For the first time this year he looked slightly below MVP-level.
2. Baltimore Ravens (#5 last week): Beat the Cowboys
Record: 5-1
Biggest thing we learned this week: That defense is going to struggle without Lardarius Webb, and Flacco is going to keep the scoring going come winter. They also lost Ray Lewis for the year.
3. Green Bay Packers (#7 last week): Beat the Texans
Record: 3-3
Biggest thing we learned this week: Shocker! The Packers scored the most points possible in our system this week, and vaulted above the three top-five teams that lost.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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