Week 4 True Power Rankings: factoring in numbers, Chiefs still in top three

It’s Week 4, and before we get to the meat of Arrowhead Pride True Power Rankings, we’ll remind you of the early-season caveat:

For at least another week or two, take what the number-crunchers say with a big grain of salt.

To learn more, take a look at the Week 3 summary, or read the introduction to the series published just before the season began.

Additional notes for the Week 4 cruncher rankings: Through Week 4, DVOA does not take opponent strength into consideration; Football Outsiders would rather wait until a few games have been played before including opponent strength in its calculations, when it will be more clear which teams are good or bad.

Ready? Here we go!

Just as we showed you in the pundit power rankings on Tuesday, the Chiefs are looking good, with an average cruncher ranking of second — tied with the Baltimore Ravens — after three weeks.

Elo knows the Chiefs ought to be a good team this year, have beaten two teams that ought to be pretty good and then a so-so team convincingly. So just like the pundits on Tuesday, Elo is pretty impressed so far.

DVOA has been impressed with the overall play of the team through three weeks — remember that DVOA concerns itself with the success or failure of individual plays — but just a little bit less than it did last week. PE continues to like that the Chiefs can not only score plenty of points, but so far, more of them than the teams they’ve played.

Then we see the big jump in the SRS ranking from 14th to seventh. This has a lot to do with the two-score victory the Chiefs had against the San Francisco 49ers — SRS uses margin of victory as its base information — but also that SRS now sees the Steelers and Chargers as above-average teams. In the eyes of SRS, their victories over those teams make the Chiefs look better.

In fact, the Steelers had the biggest jump in the averaged number-cruncher rankings, rising eleven places after holding on to win against the Buccaneers. The Seahawks rose eight spots, the Browns seven, and the Saints six.

In Tuesday’s aggregated pundit power rankings, the Patriots and the Vikings both fell four spots after upset losses. The crunchers rated them much more harshly, dropping each team 12 places in the rankings. Several pundits specifically mentioned that they’ve learned not to bury the Patriots after early-season setbacks, but the number-crunchers just don’t care about Tom Brady — or Kirk Cousins.

Now let’s average the aggregated pundit rankings from Tuesday with what the crunchers calculated.

As you can see, the Chiefs are ranked second in the Week 4 combined rankings — tops in the AFC, and well ahead of their division rivals — which serves to confirm what we saw in Tuesday’s pundit power rankings.

Elsewhere, there’s still some substantial disagreement between the pundits and the crunchers. The crunchers still rate the Jets and Ravens highly, and the pundits still aren’t seeing it. The opposite remains true this week for the Packers.

With each passing week — when SRS and PE have more data with which to work, and DVOA eventually factors opponent strength into their calculations — the pundits and crunchers may have smaller disagreements. We’ll see.

Now let’s look at the grades for the week:

Here we’ve converted the raw numbers that the crunchers provide us to standard deviations from average, which is a statistical method to determine if two values are statistically significant from each other. We show these values as letter grades — just like your teachers did in school — so they’re easier to read and interpret.

Remember the rule... unless the difference between the grades of two teams in the same column is a full letter grade or more, the difference between them is measurable, but not statistically significant.

Enjoy the Chiefs victory over the Denver Broncos, and starting on Tuesday, we’ll see how that makes things shake out.