EPA Power Rankings – Syndication Server

Week 14 EPA Power Rankings: NFC East, juggernauts? Playoff tiers forming

Dallas looks to continue the NFC East’s revival in the EPA power rankings for Week 14

The NFC East is dead, long live the NFC East! This week was headlined by a couple huge upset wins by two teams in the NFL’s worst division over two powerhouse division leaders. The New York Giants took down the Seattle Seahawks on Sunday afternoon, not allowing the Seahawks to find the endzone for the first three quarters. Then on Monday afternoon, Washington took down the undefeated Pittsburgh Steelers by holding Ben Roethlisberger to one of his worst advanced stat lines of the season.

Was that enough to knock the Steelers down at all in our rankings? Did an NFC East team finally crack the top half of the table? Before we find out, a reminder about how these are calculated:

EPA 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. For these rankings, we’ve adjusted each team’s EPA based on the strength of their opponent.

Please note these numbers are coming in prior to Wednesday’s Cowboys-Ravens game

Pittsburgh climbed to the top spot last week after their Tuesday victory over the Ravens, and the close loss to Washington was not enough to take them down. They’ve got the league’s second-best defense by adjusted EPA allowed (behind the Rams) that’s holding up a decent but unspectacular offense.

There was a bit of shuffling in the rest of the top-6, but no new teams in there. In fact, there is quite the significant dropoff after the first six teams here, indicating a clear top tier of playoff contenders. Notably absent from this tier is the Baltimore Ravens. The Ravens’ powerhouse offense from a season ago is long gone, and they’ve now got a negative adjusted EPA/play, indicating that most of their offensive plays are putting them in a worse position to score. That defense is holding the team up, but only just so.

Can the Cowboys take advantage of the Ravens’ struggles? Initially it seems unlikely, as Dallas has consistently been near the bottom of the league on both the offensive and defensive sides of the ball. But just as Washington and New York proved this week, anything can happen on any given S̶u̶n̶d̶a̶y̶ Tuesday. Dallas has remained static in the ranks this week, as these were calculated before their game, but it seems as though they will remain at 29 or 30 depending on the outcome of Tuesday’s game.

On the topic of NFC East upsets, Washington’s victory was enough to bump them from 20th to 18th, edging closer to respectability and proving that they won’t necessarily be an easy out if they end up taking the division crown. In fact, since Alex Smith took over in Week 9, Washington has produced as well as a top-10 team.

They’re right up there on both offense and defense with the other surprise, the New York Giants. In this same time frame, Daniel Jones has the NFL’s 7th best EPA/play. It’s a small sample size, but it’s pointing in a positive direction for the Giants.

The biggest movers this week come from the same game. The Patriots’ 45-0 route of the Chargers on Sunday brought New England up 5 spots and dropped LA down 4 spots. In a weird turn of events, these teams are now neck and neck in our rankings despite the fact that one just blew the doors of the other only two days ago. This is a good reminder that we can rank these teams in aggregate however we like, but the fact is some teams just match up really well against certain teams despite the perceived talent level difference.

We can modify the opponent adjustment functions to give us predictions for the coming week’s games. These rankings still see Baltimore as 12-point favorites in Tuesday’s game with the Cowboys, which is a larger deficit than either the Giants or Washington faced in Week 13. Moving further ahead, let’s see which NFC East team has the best shot at taking home another victory in Week 14.

Week 13 EPA Power Rankings: Cowboys game boosts WFT to top 20

The top teams stay on top, but one team not named the Cowboys tumbled uncontrollably in the Week 13 power rankings

The Cowboys played a football game on Thanksgiving. It did not go well. But it was not the worst loss of the week across the league! That honor belongs to the Las Vegas Raiders, who got blown out by the Atlanta Falcons, of all teams. The Raiders were enjoying a two-week run in our top-10 teams heading into the week but alas, it was not meant to be. How far did they fall in our EPA Power Rankings? And was the Cowboys loss enough to move them below the lowly Jaguars for the first time this year? Let’s rank the teams by their opponent-adjusted EPA differential and find out.

Please note these numbers are coming in prior to Wednesday’s Ravens-Steelers game

Let’s start with the elephant in the room, the Buccaneers remaining in the top spot. Tampa Bay is at a point now where it sure looks like they can dispatch of bad teams easily but fold like a house of cards against any decent opponent or the Bears. Is that really good enough to get to the number one rank here? Well, yes and no.

These numbers are volume stats, meaning we’re totaling the EPA earned by each team offense and defense over the course of the year. As we near the end of the season, when every team has played the same number of games, it holds up well. But right now, with the wild Pittsburgh schedule shifts and the late-as-possible bye week for the Bucs, Tampa has an advantage strictly by playing more games. If we calculate by EPA/game, the Bucs drop to third, swapping places with Pittsburgh while Kansas City remains in second.

But how is a 5-loss team still so high? Just take a look at who beat them. The Bucs’ 5 losses came against teams that currently rank:

5th
21st
5th
4th
2nd

With the exception of the Chicago game, none of those losses are going to hit Tampa very hard in their adjusted EPA differential because we’re adjusting by strength of opponent.

Let’s jump down the list to see if the Cowboys fell down any more after getting run over by Antonio Gibson on Thursday. As luck would have it, they remain 29th by nature of the Lions also taking a double digit loss at home on Thanksgiving, the Jaguars being bad for a longer period of time this year, and the Jets still being the Jets. Dallas did, however, manage to distance themselves further from the rest of their division, and not in a good way.

Washington bumped up to 20th this week, the best ranking for any team in the NFC East since Washington was 19th in eek 3. It’s not a whole lot to write home about, but they are fielding a legitimate NFL defense that’s making up for a poor offense at times this year.

But not all is looking bad on the offensive side of the ball for Washington. Antonio Gibson has been running wild of late, and it’s more than making up for the mediocre passing game. By EPA/carry, Gibson had one of the better rushing performances of the season on Thursday, even if it was overshadowed three days later by Derrick Henry and Nick Chubb.

This performance, paired with a defense that produced the third-best EPA/play allowed in Week 12, bumped Washington up three spots this week.

Speaking of jumping up three spots, the Falcons leapfrogged over the Raiders not only on Sunday but also in this week’s power rankings. The Raiders’ fall was our biggest fall of the week by far, dropping them from 8th all the way to 19th, their lowest rank since Week 4. It’s wild to see such a drop after just one game, but losing by 37 to a below-average team has consequences. The Raiders have toyed with being a great team at times this year, but overall they’re still probably just an average team.

Bringing it back to our home division here, let’s take a look at how the East’s EPA differential has moved over the course of the season. This is where we can really see Washington taking over as the team to beat for the division crown.

And now, looking forward, we can use these opponent adjustments to make predictions for the outcomes of the Week 13 games. We’ve got a murderer’s row coming up against the NFC East this weekend, with only the Giants expected to come within one score of their opponent. But then again, these predictions don’t know that Baltimore is facing a severe COVID outbreak right now, and could be without numerous starters for thee Cowboys game. Can that make up a 12.5 point spread? Only time will tell.

Week 12 EPA Power Rankings: Cowboys win improves stock

Cowboys finally climbing again, and the Steelers are the real deal despite their soft schedule. But is it enough to grab the top spot?

The allure of the “tank for draft position” mindset has been a perhaps surprising and unwelcome visitor this Dallas Cowboys’ season, but even with that aura surrounding the team right now, it sure feels good in the moment to get a win. And against a team that had crept up from 21st to the top-10 over the last four weeks to boot!

How much difference did beating the Vikings do for the Cowboys in this week’s EPA Power Rankings? Let’s take a look, after a brief overview of the definitions of EPA used in this article.

Dallas moved above 30th for the first time since Week 7, but still only managed to get up one spot this week. Even so, moving up sure feels a hell of a lot better than getting closer to the Jets. Also, Andy Dalton looked much better than he has all year, approaching more of what we might’ve expected when he signed as the backup.

Per nflfastR’s EPA and CPOE* models, Dalton was the most average quarterback in the NFL this past week, a huge improvement from what Dallas has had at the position since Dak Prescott went down.

*CPOE: Completion Percentage Over Expected, based on depth of target and area of the field

There are a couple names on this plot that are perhaps more noticeable than that of Dalton that we should talk about as well. Carson Wentz again has struggled to put his team in a better position to score (the base driver of EPA) and it has once again thrown the division into a near 4-way tie if it weren’t for that one tie in the Eagles’ record. But the other name that jumped out to me at least is Tua Tagovailoa.

Tua had the first really bad game of his career, and it led to the Dolphins taking the worst hit in our power rankings this week. They dropped nine spots, from a top-10 team to below average. Miami finishing the year as a top-10 team was likely always a pipe dream for Dolphins fans, so the fact that they were playing that well after 10 weeks is a testament to what the rebuild down there has already accomplished.

The other big drop in the ranks was the Minnesota Vikings because, well, losing to an NFC East opponent has a tendency to hurt your opponent-adjusted statistics.

Let’s move on towards the top of the list now where, while we don’t have a new top team, we do see the Pittsburgh Steelers climb above the 3-spot for the first time this season. It might seem weird at first that the Bucs didn’t drop after losing on Monday Night Football, but that says more about how good the Rams have been this year than anything else. Losing a close one to LA just won’t hurt you like losing a close one to a bad opponent.

Back to the Steelers, let’s take a look at how they got here.

Pittsburgh is the only remaining unbeaten team, and they’ve got a decent path to 16-0 if they get past the Ravens this Thursday. So why have they not been ranked #1 at all this year? The answer in these ranks lies in the opponent adjustments. No team this season has been hit harder by opponent adjustments than Pittsburgh, meaning they’ve played arguably the easiest schedule. They’ve got two quality wins over Tennessee and Baltimore, but after that the best team they’ve played so far is the 19th-ranked Cleveland Browns.

However, you can’t control who you play, just how you play. And the Steelers are playing as good as anyone right now. They’ve managed to maintain an elite defense from last season while drastically improving their offense with a healthy Ben Roethlisberger starting rather than Duck Hodges. And by dominating the Jaguars on Sunday, it’s nearly time to recognize them as the best team in the NFL regardless of who they’ve played.

Using these opponent adjustments, we can also compute some line predictions for the coming week. Please note, however, that this is strictly based on team strength as a whole so far this year, and does not take into account any injury sustained recently. What I’m saying is don’t take this at face value that the Joe Burrow-less Bengals are going to win this week. But, if they do…there’s suddenly a very attainable path to the Cowboys taking the division lead this week.

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NFL Week 10 EPA Power Rankings: Cowboys trending up, sort of

How far did Tampa’s epic loss drop them this week, and just how bad was it relative to some other blowouts in recent memory?

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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NFL Week 8 EPA Power Rankings: Cowboys plummet, dissecting throws behind LOS

Cowboys continue to slide in the power rankings. Also, which QBs are benefitting from the short pass the most?

The top of the NFL, for the most part, stayed put this week in our EPA power rankings. No team moved into or fell out of the top-5. But just outside of that, there was quite a bit of chaos and movement with these teams, headlined by the resurgence of a powerhouse NFC team of last season. The Cowboys, on the other hand, continue to slip. As always, these rankings are based on expected points added (EPA), adjusted for strength of opponent.

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.

Dallas slid two more spots this week after dropping eight spots last time. They’re now third in the division by this measure and entering into the realm of a New York team, though mercifully still nowhere near as bad as the Jets. Still, Dallas is going to have to get a pretty miraculous performance from Ben DiNucci (or whichever quarterback is starting next week) to avoid dropping to the worst adjusted EPA differential in the East.

The Bucs remain atop the list after a dominant win over a Raiders team that, despite having a statement win over the Chiefs just a week ago, has never really been more than average in terms of their EPA differential.

Then we get some real movement in our rankings, with our biggest risers in two California teams. The Chargers are suddenly in the top-10 as Justin Herbert continues to shine, and the 49ers appear to be back to their 2019 selves after handing Bill Belichick the worst home loss of his Patriots career.

These two teams have something else in common too, aside from a good move up in the power ranks. They both feature offenses that throw the ball at or behind the line of scrimmage on over a quarter of their dropbacks. EPA/play is a stable and relatively predictive measure of quarterback success, but it doesn’t take into account how many screen passes or jet sweep toss plays different teams run. For example, here’s a Jimmy Garoppolo “throw” that went for +1.3 EPA, despite Garoppolo targeting Deebo Samuel 5 yards behind the line of scrimmage:

Now, it’s not fair to punish quarterbacks for this by say, using the air EPA on the play of -1.2, but if we’re trying to evaluate quarterback talent it’s not necessarily fair to include these either. There’s also no easy way to define which throws came on plays like this and which were checkdowns or throwaways. But we can get a decent approximation with simple air yards, the distance the pass is thrown relative to the line of scrimmage. By separating throws at or behind the line of scrimmage from throws beyond it, we can add more even more context to each quarterback’s play through this year.

Herbert and Garoppolo trail only Russell Wilson in EPA/play on passes at or behind the line of scrimmage, but they also run these plays nearly twice as often as Wilson (~26% for Herbert/Garoppolo, 15% for Wilson). So while Herbert and Garoppolo rank 11th and 8th, respectively, in fumble adjusted EPA/play (per rbsdm.com), they look much more average when asked to throw beyond the line of scrimmage. Herbert only drops to 13th, but Garoppolo goes all the way down to 17th in the NFL in EPA/play when just looking at plays with positive air yards.

Aaron Rodgers is far ahead of the pack in EPA/play on passes beyond the line of scrimmage, but he’s also asked to do it less often than anyone else. Rodgers currently throws a pass at or behind the LOS on nearly 31% of his dropbacks, the only QB above 30% in the NFL. It’s actually quite scary to think what might happen if he keeps up this EPA/play and the Packers decide to air it out a bit more often.

Meanwhile in Dallas, there’s a pretty clear distinction between the offense with Dak Prescott and the offense with Andy Dalton. Dalton is second to Rodgers in the rate of passes behind the LOS (27.1%) while Dak ranked 14th (22.6%). There’s also the, well, more obvious difference in their EPA/play. Dalton has had the least success on short passes and the third-least success on longer passes. He hasn’t played two full games yet, so be cautious making complete judgements here, but these signs almost point to the idea that DiNucci can’t really be much worse, right? That’s my shot at hope.

The optimism isn’t lasting long this time, however, after looking at the adjusted EPA predictions for Week 8. These predictions like Dallas a bit more than the Vegas spread of 7.5, but I’m guessing the further we get from Dak the more in line these predictions will be with the rest of the crowd. Last week we went 10-4 with the adjusted EPA predictions, let’s see how we do this time.

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NFL Week 7 EPA Power Rankings: A new top dog as Cowboys fish for the floor

Cowboys plummet while a new team emerges as the top dog in the NFL

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.

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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Week 5 EPA Power Rankings: the Cowboys are what they are

Are the Cowboys once again better than their poor record suggests? Is it just 2019 all over again?

At the quarter mark of the NFL season, there’s enough data and film on these teams to get a decent idea of what they’ll be moving forward. Are the Dallas Cowboys actually a 1-3 level team? Or are we in for another anomaly year where they look better than their record by nearly every measure?

To answer that, let’s go back to the opponent-adjusted EPA power rankings. If you’re unfamiliar with EPA, it stands for Expected Points Added, and the numbers found in here all come from nflfastR’s Expected Points model.

In these opponent-adjusted EPA power rankings, we’re looking at the cumulative EPA for each team through four weeks, adjusted for strength of opponent. One important note: Adjusting for opponent doesn’t really increase predictiveness, but it can help add to the descriptiveness. Let’s get to it.

Last year, the story of these rankings was how good Dallas looked despite their mediocre record. They actually had the sixth-best adjusted EPA differential heading into Week 17 with a 7-8 record!

This year doesn’t look to be as kind.

They are 13th in adjusted offensive EPA, lower than might be expected, and 21st in defensive EPA, which is somehow still better than expected for the team with the most points allowed so far. They get a boost with the opponent adjustments for playing the Seahawks, Rams, and Browns, who rank 4, 5, and 6 respectively in adjusted offensive EPA.

The teams that dropped the most with the opponent adjustments added compared to their standard EPA differential are the 49ers and the Steelers, both of whom get dinged for soft starting schedules. On the other end, the Chargers and the Vikings get the biggest boost to their ranks for playing tough opening schedules.

Adding in opponent adjustments of course doesn’t always add the right context too early in the season. Football Outsiders doesn’t add in opponent adjustments until after Week 4 in their DVOA rankings.

When is the best time to add those adjustments?

We want to find a point in the season where each team has a large enough sample size to be somewhat predictive of the rest of the season. Where is that point? Is Week 4 late enough? Let’s find out.

Using every season since 2009, I looked at each team’s EPA/play on offense and defense after any number of weeks and compared it to their EPA/play over the remainder of the season. As it turns out, four weeks is about as good of a time as any to predict future performance for any given team.

A quick explainer on reading this chart: A team’s offensive EPA/play after Week 4 explains about 34% of the variance in that same team’s offensive EPA/play for the rest of the year. The correlation peaks after Week 6 and then slowly starts going down again as the number of games being predicted gets smaller, adding more variance.

So after four weeks, we’ve got about as good of an idea projecting these offenses forward as we’ll get. Defense is another story, as it’s always pretty volatile no matter how far into the season you are.

This is part of the reason you might hear the phrase “defense doesn’t matter.” Let me be clear here: defense does matter. It’s just much harder to project going forward and is impacted significantly by the offenses it has to defend against, while offenses are typically much more stable and easier to project. So what “defense doesn’t matter” really means is that we can’t make defensive projections for the rest of the year with the confidence that we make offensive projections.

Looking forward, we probably have a decent idea of how good the Cowboys are. Fortunately for them, seven of their final twelve games are against teams in the bottom six of these rankings. Dallas has a good lead within the division in terms of their EPA differential, which aligns with the fact that they’ve still got the best odds to win the NFC East at 53%, per FiveThirtyEight.

Dallas will get a golden opportunity to take over the division lead to align with those chances on Sunday when they go up against the struggling New York Giants.

6 amazing, impressive or depressing Cowboys-Browns, quarter-pole stats

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