One game sample sizes are not enough to make sweeping judgements. That being said…the Dallas Cowboys can absolutely not afford to lose Dak Prescott to another team at any point in the near future.
Dallas looked utterly lost with backup Andy Dalton in the game on Monday night, in front of 25,000 fans and a national TV audience no less. But believe it or not, Dallas didn’t actually manage the steepest fall in this week’s EPA power rankings.
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.
The 38-10 drubbing Dallas took on Monday Night Football dropped them eight spots in our power rankings. They fall behind Philadelphia, who takes over the top spot in the NFC East and might now become the favorites in the division should Andy Dalton continue to play at the same level he exhibited against the Cardinals. The Cowboys offense fell from 12th to 19th after just this one game, and the defense dropped to the third-worst adjusted EPA allowed in the NFL.
All the Yikes
All four NFC East teams are now in the bottom 7, so at this point whichever team manages the most division wins is going to be your winner and be rewarded with a home game against someone like the Los Angeles Rams.
As I mentioned earlier, the Cowboys didn’t actually feel the most precipitous drop this week. There were two teams that faired worse: The Cleveland Browns fell 9 spots after a 38-7 loss to the Steelers, and the Minnesota Vikings fell a whopping 11 spots, from the top-10 almost to the bottom-10. They had faced one of the tougher schedules in the league heading into this week, which is probably why they were still so high in these rankings last time, but getting beat by the hapless Falcons seems to have put them in a place we all intuitively agree with.
One more note on the bad teams: the Jets appear to be one of the worst teams we’ve seen recently by any measure, but after six weeks they’ve actually got a better adjusted EPA differential than the Dolphins did last season. The Dolphins, after six games in 2019, had a whopping -122.1 adjusted EPA differential. So while it’s completely true that the Jets are the worst team in the NFL this season, let’s pump the brakes on them being the worst in modern history.
That’s enough of the downers. Let’s take a look at who made moves up our board, starting with the new top team in the NFL.
But On the Bright Side
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers beat down the (previously top-5) Green Bay Packers on Sunday, rocketing their defense to the top of the NFL by a wide margin at the moment. Paired with a top-10 offense, they’ve now got enough to overtake the Kansas City Chiefs in the top slot.
The biggest positive mover this week is the Pittsburgh Steelers, who jumped up 14(!) spots after the big win against Cleveland. The main driver behind this was their defense moving from ranking 21st all the way to 3rd(!!) in just one week.
Why are we getting such large jumps here? It comes down to the opponent adjustments. These adjustments help to add context to each team’s performance, but they add more variance in the early goings. As we move forward, expect to see each team level out a bit as they find their real rank in the NFL.
The biggest surprise on this list is the Carolina Panthers, who are now inside the top-10 in adjusted EPA differential. Without opponent adjustments, they’ve got an almost perfectly average EPA/play on offense and defense, as illustrated beautifully at Ben Baldwin’s rbsdm.com:
Adjusting for the fact that they’ve played five teams in the top half of the league, with their only loss by more than one score coming at the hands of the now top-ranked Bucs, and you’ve got a recipe for a top-10 team.
As mentioned before, these ranks are subject to pretty significant weekly fluctuations early on in the season, and I would expect the Panthers to fall a bit before the season ends. But this seems to be evidence that they are miles better than most gave them credit for heading into the season.
On the way out, let’s take a peek at how these opponent adjustments see the Week 7 slate going. Despite the big loss on Monday, Dallas still remain favored against Washington by this method, though it’s very close. Last week’s predictions didn’t do so hot, picking just four winners. Let’s see if it does any better this time.
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