NFL Preseason Rankings & Season Projections For 2014

September 2, 2014 - by Tom Federico

With the NFL season kicking off Thursday in Seattle, here is our annual post outlining our NFL preseason ratings, with season projections added for good measure, for every NFL team in 2014-15. Below the data table is more information on how we rank and project teams.

(By the way, if you’re playing in an NFL office pool this year, don’t forget to check out our 2014 NFL pick’em pool picks and NFL survivor pool picks.)

Preseason NFL Rankings Highlights

When we make comparisons to Vegas below, we are using Chase Stuart’s implied Vegas SRS Ratings as the basis for comparison. Those rankings are based on preseason lines that are several months old now, but they should still be close enough for our basic purposes here.

Agreement with Vegas regarding top teams. There is close agreement between us and Vegas on the top six ranked teams this year: Denver (#1 TR, #2 Vegas), Seattle (#2 TR, #1 Vegas), San Francisco (#3 in both), New England (#4 TR, #5 Vegas), New Orleans (#5 TR, #6 Vegas), and Green Bay (#6 TR, #4 Vegas).

Denver and Seattle a cut above the rest. From a ratings perspective, last year’s Super Bowl teams also project as the clear top two teams in 2014, and are only separated by one-third of a point. There’s a bit of a drop to San Francisco at #3, then the ratings of the next four teams are decently spread apart.
Our three most underrated teams. While it can be misleading to compare teams only by rankings, compared to Vegas, we’re most optimistic on the following four teams: NY Giants (#9 TR, #19 Vegas), San Diego (#10 TR, #20 Vegas), and Arizona (#11 TR, #18 Vegas).
Our three most overrated teams. On the flip side, compared to Vegas we’re the most pessimistic on the following four teams: Chicago (#22 TR, #8 Vegas), Kansas City (#23 TR, #13 Vegas), and Philadelphia (#15 TR, #9 Vegas).

Glossary

Team ratings (“TR Rating”) are expressed as points better (a positive rating) or worse (a negative rating) than the average team in the NFL, when playing on a neutral field
“Vegas” the implied Vegas ranking from Chase Stuart; “Playoffs” is odds to make the playoffs; “Division” is odds to win the division; “Super Bowl” is odds to win the 2014 Super Bowl
If you’re curious to learn more about how we come up with these numbers, you can check out a 2012 post that covered NFL preseason rankings components (although we’ve made some tweaks since then)

2014 NFL Preseason Rankings & Projections

TR Rank	Vegas	Team	TR Rating	Wins	Losses	Playoffs	Division	Super Bowl
1	2	Denver Broncos	7.65	11.4	4.6	84%	70%	17.0%
2	1	Seattle Seahawks	7.27	10.8	5.2	71%	46%	13.4%
3	3	San Francisco 49ers	6.58	10.5	5.5	67%	39%	10.4%
4	5	New England Patriots	5.41	10.8	5.2	79%	66%	11.1%
5	6	New Orleans Saints	4.18	9.8	6.2	59%	44%	6.1%
6	4	Green Bay Packers	3.54	9.6	6.4	58%	46%	5.2%
7	10	Cincinnati Bengals	2.90	9.3	6.7	55%	37%	4.5%
8	7	Carolina Panthers	2.67	9.0	7.0	48%	34%	3.9%
9	19	New York Giants	1.68	8.9	7.1	50%	40%	3.2%
10	20	San Diego Chargers	1.24	8.6	7.4	44%	21%	2.7%
11	18	Arizona Cardinals	0.94	7.8	8.2	27%	10%	1.6%
12	11	Indianapolis Colts	0.91	8.7	7.3	50%	37%	2.7%
13	17	Baltimore Ravens	0.80	8.6	7.4	44%	27%	2.4%
14	12	Detroit Lions	0.65	8.4	7.6	39%	26%	1.9%
15	9	Philadelphia Eagles	0.38	8.0	8.0	35%	26%	1.8%
16	21	Houston Texans	0.31	9.1	6.9	56%	43%	2.6%
17	15	Pittsburgh Steelers	0.23	8.5	7.5	44%	26%	2.3%
18	14	Atlanta Falcons	-0.73	7.3	8.7	23%	14%	0.9%
19	22	Miami Dolphins	-0.99	8.1	7.9	37%	19%	1.5%
20	16	Dallas Cowboys	-1.20	7.4	8.6	27%	19%	1.0%
21	25	St. Louis Rams	-1.39	6.7	9.3	16%	6%	0.7%
22	8	Chicago Bears	-1.46	7.1	8.9	24%	15%	0.9%
23	13	Kansas City Chiefs	-1.98	6.9	9.1	20%	8%	0.6%
24	23	Washington Redskins	-2.36	7.0	9.0	22%	15%	0.6%
25	29	Minnesota Vikings	-2.60	6.8	9.2	19%	12%	0.5%
26	30	Tennessee Titans	-3.02	7.3	8.7	28%	18%	0.6%
27	27	Cleveland Browns	-3.18	6.9	9.1	21%	10%	0.5%
28	24	Tampa Bay Buccaneers	-3.25	6.2	9.8	14%	8%	0.4%
29	28	Buffalo Bills	-3.60	6.5	9.5	18%	8%	0.4%
30	26	New York Jets	-4.21	6.1	9.9	14%	6%	0.3%
31	31	Oakland Raiders	-8.05	4.0	12.0	3%	1%	0.0%
32	32	Jacksonville Jaguars	-9.32	4.0	12.0	4%	2%	0.0%

How We Rank & Project NFL Teams

Our preseason process has two steps:

Generate preseason team ratings. First we gather a bunch of data on teams. We feed this data into a model we built to generate our preseason team ratings and rankings. Every year, we re-calibrate this model based on having a new season’s worth of data.
Run simulations of the 2014 season. Second, we feed our preseason ratings into our season simulator (internally known as the “Awww-simulator” because we think it is awesome), which plays out the 2014 season thousands of times.

Thanks to randomness, every individual season simulation ends up looking differently. But once we run lots of simulations, the outcomes — such as the projected final win-loss record for each team — start to converge on the numbers that end up being our official 2014 preseason projections. The simulator is sophisticated, even accounting for the fact that our preseason rating for any given team may end up being wrong.

Unlike the vast majority of pre-season rankers out there, we do very little subjective evaluation of teams. This approach generally serves us well. Inevitably some years turn out better than others (occasionally for factors out of our control, like mid-season injuries to key players), but we’ve beaten Vegas at this game several times now, and we typically outpredict almost all of the NFL “experts” you see on TV.

Three Things To Keep In Mind

Before you make a comment about where we’ve ranked your favorite team and call us a bunch of no good bleepety-bleeps, please keep a couple things in mind:

We’re using a systematic approach to rank all 32 teams. Because our approach generalizes predictive factors, it’s going to get plenty of individual teams wrong, and a few of them very wrong, for many different reasons. The goal here is overall accuracy across the entire system of 32 teams, and to be right more than we are wrong when a projection of ours deviates the most from consensus opinion. If we wanted to maximize our odds of making the most accurate projection for only your specific favorite team, we’d likely take a very different approach.
Look at ratings, not just rankings. For example, less than a third of a point separates the #11 team (Arizona) from the #14 team (Detroit). Those four teams are all close to being equals. Often times, the distinction between two closely ranked teams is essentially negligible from a ratings perspective, so it’s not even worth debating.
Making futures bets requires more information. Just because our models think that a team has a higher or lower expected 2014 win total than the current Vegas line does NOT mean that it’s a good bet. Among other things, payout odds for futures bets make a huge impact on your expected returns. In short, hunting for value in current futures odds based on our projections is a more involved process than is covered in this post (here’s an example from 2012).