Week 13 True Power Rankings: Chiefs hold in third — plus cool charts

On Tuesday, our Week 13 Pundit Power Rankings showed the Kansas City Chiefs holding in third place our aggregated pundit rankings model. No big surprise there, since two of the top three teams had a bye this week. We see something quite similar with the number-crunchers in Week 13.

Here’s how they see the NFL this week:

The Chiefs remain in second place with the number-crunchers by holding steady everywhere except in PE, where they drop to fifth place.

Just as we saw with the pundits on Tuesday, no teams moved into the top tier; we only see a slight reordering of the teams already there. The Cleveland Browns and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers moved out of the bottom tier, and the Cincinnati Bengals and Detroit Lions took their places.

But just because it’s interesting, I’d like to draw your attention to how the crunchers see the Denver Broncos.

On Tuesday, I pointed out that USA Today’s Nate Davis was an outlier among the pundits, moving the Broncos up 10 spots to 11th place in his rankings following their narrow win over the Pittsburgh Steelers. I said I agreed with Elliot Harrison’s take on NFL.com — that the Steelers had essentially dominated the Broncos and had lost because Denver made timely plays at the end of the game.

But as we see here, the crunchers agree with Davis, ranking the Broncos 11th in Week 13. The crunchers have actually valued the Broncos more than the pundits for quite a while now — as we see in this chart.

Just as we have noted from the beginning of this series, Elo — because it considers a team’s quality in previous seasons — will tend to follow the pundit rankings more closely than the other data systems. You can see that here. But unlike the pundits, Elo — and the other data models — doesn’t concern itself with quarterbacks, pass rushers, injuries and many other factors the writers take into consideration.

But as you can see, since about Week 6, the other data models — particularly DVOA — have ranked the Broncos substantially more highly than the pundits.

Here’s another interesting example.

When the season began, the pundits valued the Chicago Bears more than Elo — probably in large part to the Khalil Mack trade, of which Elo was ignorant. After the Bears lost to the Dolphins in Week 6, the pundits cooled off a bit. But as we see here, the current-year data models have consistently ranked the Bears as a top tier team ever since Week 5 — and now the pundits and Elo are finally catching up to that evaluation.

Now we’ll move on, and see what happens when we put it all together in the Week 13 True Power Rankings.

Here, the Chiefs remain in third overall — still tops in the AFC, but with two NFC teams above them.

Again, we see the same teams in the top tier with a little bit of reordering. Down at the bottom, the Browns moved out, and the Jaguars moved in.

We’ve already covered the disagreement over the Broncos. The writers still aren’t buying into the quarterback situation with the Baltimore Ravens, while the crunchers still think they’re a better team than their record might indicate. The scribes think the 49ers have become garbage, but the crunchers like them better.

And that brings us to our weekly reality-check: the Week 13 cruncher grades.

We’re back to six teams in the top group — the Chargers came back in — along with four teams at the bottom, and a while lotta meh in between.

Now let’s enjoy the this week’s games. Join us again on Tuesday — we’ll load up the magic spreadsheet and see how it all shakes out for Week 14.