It seems like every week this year we’ve got a new best team in the NFL. The reigning champion Kansas City Chiefs looked great to start the year before being upset by the Raiders. Green Bay started off on fire before losing to the 1-5 Vikings. And now what was last week the top-ranked Tampa Bay Buccaneers have been handed the worst loss of the season at the hands of the Saints. It turns out division games are hard.
Thanks to that Sunday night massacre, we’ve got a new top dog in Week 10’s EPA Power Rankings.
What is EPA? It stands for Expected Points Added. Expected Points, the foundation of many analytical arguments, uses data from previous NFL seasons to determine how many points a team is likely to come away with on a given play based on down, distance, time remaining, and field position. The difference in expected points at the start of a play and expected points at the end is referred to as expected points added, or EPA.
Taking the difference between each team’s offensive EPA and their defensive EPA allowed gives us something not unlike point differential, with a bit more context included. After adjusting for strength of opponent, here are out current EPA power rankings as we head into Week 10.
Dallas moved up a spot this week! The Cowboys played a surprisingly close contest with the undefeated Steelers, despite starting their fourth-string quarterback. Going in with no expectations, it was actually a pretty fun one. The one thing these ranks don’t take into account is special teams, which I’m starting to think is an oversight because Dallas really stayed in the game because of a couple big plays in the forgotten third phase of the game, like this one:
COWBOYS WILD PUNT RETURN 😳
(via @thecheckdown)pic.twitter.com/EXwzx6Yd93
— Bleacher Report (@BleacherReport) November 8, 2020
Dallas distanced themselves from the Jets with this performance and closed in on the other New York team and division rival. Technically the division title is still in play, but the Eagles seem to be more competent than they were in the first few weeks and will be tough to overtake.
How about on the flipside of this chart?
After all these weeks with random upsets of what might be considered the best team in the league, we’re back to square one with the Chiefs sitting atop our board. As long as they’ve got Patrick Mahomes and Andy Reid, it’s tough to see them falling very far. Once again they’ve got the most efficient offense, but this year they’ve paired it with an above-average defense. Winning two Super Bowls in a row is hard and there’s plenty of randomness involved once you get to the playoffs, but right now Kansas City sure looks primed to repeat.
Tampa only dropped to number two after one of the worst losses in Tom Brady’s career. The Bucs offense, after a pitiful 3-point performance, plummeted from 8th all the way to 16th by adjusted EPA. How bad was this loss? Here’s a look at every team game since 2009 by EPA for and EPA allowed.
Tampa’s defensive performance was bad, and the offensive performance was one of the worst since 2009. Overall, they had a single-game EPA differential of -38.9, the 14th worst loss in this timeframe. For those curious, the worst EPA differential in this time is -52.5, which happened when the Titans fell 59-0 in 2009 to…Tom Brady and the Patriots.
Anyway, this was also a huge win for the Saints, who leapt all the way from 14th to 7th in our rankings. They aren’t in the top-5 in either offensive or defensive efficiency, but they’re good enough on both sides of the ball to rank as the 4th best in the NFC.
Using opponent adjusted EPA, we can throw out some predictions for the whole Week 10 slate. Last time we went 9-5 trying to pick the winners. We would’ve reached 10 wins, but the Chargers, well, did Chargers things. Let’s see if we can get there this time.
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